Good-bye

On Tuesday, August 25th, 2009, at about 5:45pm, we said good-bye to our dear, sweet Puff. After over two weeks of eating nothing--and I mean NOTHING AT ALL except for about 3ml of food we fed her with a syringe--she was nearing the end. We did the subcutaneous fluids for about six days, along with daily injections of Pepcid, but she never did take a bite of food. She did her famous water dance, as she's done for years, but only took in an ounce or two of water over the course of many days, all of that from her favorite cup that we brought back from Williamsburg. The last three days of her little life found her hiding under the bed and occasionally coming downstairs to soak up some sun in the living room or into the guest room or along the front wall of our bedroom to pee on the floor, something she had never done before.

She purred up until the very end, and when we took her outside those last two days--her first time outside except to go to the vet--she sniffed and listened, her little pegged feet wobbling in the grass as she explored. We took her up into Oren's treehouse, where she sat and smiled and surveyed the back yard, purring up a storm. It was her body that failed her, not her spirit. We buried her under that tree, in an old black shirt that Oren had outgrown. It was his suggestion to bury her in something dark, since her favorite clothing to sleep on or rub against was always dark, better to showcase her beautiful white fur.

We were together, three humans and one kitty, as she took her last breaths in the vet's office. It was horrendously sad and yet peaceful. Rick held her and Oren and I spoke softly to her as the medicine went into her vein and we said our farewells.

What an incredible blessing she was in our lives. Contrary and recalcitrant, she was never a lap kitty. She resisted being held or carried, but would plop down just beyond our reach so that we would have to bend over or change positions to pet her. She went through phases where she would sleep under the bed, on the bed, on my pillow, on the couch, at the top of the stairs, and then she would hide away for hours when we couldn't find her at all. She couldn't tolerate the dog or the vacuum cleaner, and would not swallow a pill unless we were really, really sly about it. Nothing that anyone ever suggested made that process easier, and even toward the end of her life when her energy level was practically nil, putting a pill into her was like fitting a bowling ball into a wiggly sink drain. "Not gonna happen, not now, not ever, so just give it up, Mom!"

The cat-shaped hole in our hearts insists on being re-filled, but we will try to wait a little while so that we might fully grieve our little girl. Her spirit is in the house, her fur still lining the baseboards, still woven into every garment any of us own (especially the black ones!). When the house settles, I think it's Puff walking down the hall. This morning when the tag on my hair dryer moved, I expected the movement to be Puff walking into the bathroom. I swear I can hear her purring as I lie down to sleep at night. For a tiny puff ball of a kitty, she filled up a very big space for her 15 years.

So as this chapter closes, another one opens. We will never find another kitty like Puff, but that's OK. We were privileged to be her humans for so long, and there can never be a creature like her. But, there is another (or maybe more than one...) little fuzzy feline ready to crawl into our hearts, and I look forward to the adventure.

Doing the right thing

Our 15-year-old kitty, Puff the Magic Kitty, hasn't been herself for the last couple of days. She is our oldest baby, about a year older than our son, and we adore her. She is white, medium-hair, with a bobbed tail (an accident at birth, perhaps), and has dark markings on her back and sides that look exactly like a little poodle is riding piggy-back. She is THE most beautiful cat in the universe. Not the most cuddly cat in the world, Puff adores being petted but not carried. She is not a lap kitty, but when I had my foot surgery a couple of years back, she slept beside me every night as long as I was on pain meds, as if to make sure I was still breathing. When Oren was a baby, she and her sister Harriet (who died nine years ago from kidney failure) would crawl into his stroller and sleep, and when Oren was sleeping in his bouncy/vibrating seat, they would watch him, silent sentinels observing the baby human.

Several months ago, we were sure we were losing our Puff. She started throwing up, not just her normal couple-times-a-week purging, but everything in her stomach and then some. She stopped eating and drinking, and then she started wobbling and looking unbalanced and dissheveled. The most distressing symptom was the lack of purring. Puff is a purr box. You look at her, smile, and her engines start humming. But for a day or so, not a purr was to be found. We knew it was the end. We took her to the vet, who couldn't diagnose anything acutely wrong, and then took her back home, prepared to lose her. Rick and I even walked in the yard looking for a good burial plot. I haven't cried that hard since.

And then miraculously, Puff felt just fine, thank you very much. We figure a couple of things happened. First, she probably heard us talking about digging a hole, and snapped out of it. Second, during all of this drama, we completely changed her food from a tiny bit of wet food in the evenings (for her heart meds) and dry the rest of the time to an all-wet diet.

Yeah, she probably played us a little bit...

But regardless, we had our Puff back and we were glad. She gave us another scare a month or so later, but never stopped purring, so we felt like she would be OK. And then day before yesterday, she started throwing up and stopped eating. I cleaned up ten or more puddles of vomit on the floor (this is why we don't have and will never voluntarily have carpet in a house). I had scheduled a nail trim anyway, so yesterday I took her in and had the vet examine her.

Once again, nothing startlingly acute came back, but Puff's kidneys aren't completely healthy, and she may have an infection. Both issues can be helped with meds, but one of them is an oral medication, which scares me to death. Giving a cat a pill or a tincture is a nightmare, and Puff gets so stressed out that I wonder if we'll do more harm than good. There are other things we can do as well, including injections of anti-acid medication and subcutaneous fluids, which we can also administer at home.

But how much is too much? While the notion of giving her an injection or two isn't abhorrent in any way to me (probably because I have no problem with needles and have never thought shots of any kind were all that painful), I wonder how she would feel. Would she start to hide whenever I approached? Or would she feel so much better that it would be worth it? I just don't know.

I want to do the right thing by her, and I feel like she has a lot of life left in her, but she is a kitty and by virtue of her feline status, I believe she deserves to be treated as kindly and humanely as possible, which precludes anything unnecessarily invasive just to make us humans feel better and less guilty.

Yesterday at the vet (thankfully I got the good vet instead of the fresh-out-of-vet-school-vet who wants to do every test and every intervention known to man), I asked Puff if she would please tell me when it is time for her to go. I've never had to put a pet down for old age, so I don't know if I'll recognize the signs. Even the vet said that she didn't think Puff was there yet. Maybe if she stops purring completely we'll recognize it as a sign.

When we thought we were going to lose her back in December, I told Rick that no matter what sort of pain we would experience by her loss, it was worth it as a tiny payment for the enormity of joy that little creature has brought into our world.

This is the price we pay for love.