Then in early February 2015, I found a big scratch on the side of her neck. She must have been digging at herself hard. I didn't think maybe something in that area was irritating her. My husband said she stopped showing up for breakfast, and ate very little at dinner time. Again, we wrote it off to her age. After all, she was approaching 80 years old in human years. I wasn't eating like I used to either. By the middle of February, she wasn't eating at all that we could tell, and hiding behind the bathroom door.
Finally, I accepted she was dying. Old age was coming to collect. She was moving slow and wobbly, and would clamp her mouth down and turn her head if I offered food, even her favorites. But what was worse, suddenly I could pick her up easily. She had no fight left in her to resist.
My younger cat, Kira, had similar symptoms back in November, sleeping on the heat vents, walking wobbly, not eating. The vet even decided she probably had a brain tumor, and when I declined a $1,000 MRI, they sent me home with Prednisone tablets. Kira was herself again in a month. I knew Arbee hated the car and the vet, but I had to try.
Another bad sign. She was mostly quiet all the way to the vet, even though we had to wait two hours because we didn't have an appointment. After pleading with the desk staff, they squeezed us in, but I got the meanest, least compassionate of the vets at my favorite practice, and she was obviously irritated that I had waited so long to bring Arbee in. The last time they had seen her, four years ago when she was obese, she was 10 pounds. Now she weighed in at 5.1.
"She's lost half her body weight," the vet said in an accusing tone. (Maybe she was just exasperated at neglectful pet owners, but I felt accused.) "There's no point running a lot of tests. It's probably her kidneys failing. You should put her down now. Don't let her suffer." I snapped back like I had been slapped. Right now? Put her down? Okay, she was barely moving on the examination table. Her temperature was below normal, her heart beat was slow, but...but...you brought Kira back from the brink.
"We can hydrate her, maybe give her an antibiotic, but it'll probably just kill her on the spot!" the vet said. Again, I felt slapped. My mind was racing, trying to figure out what to do. I was almost ready to vote to try all that, even though it might kill her, because then it would be out of my hands. But before I could make up my mind, the wheels were in motion. The assistant came in with a warmed up bag of fluids, but she kept the needle in Arbee's neck for such a brief time, barely a minute or two, I knew they were just faking it. When they hydrated Kira, it took more than five minutes to get a bag of fluids in her, and they had to keep squeezing the bag to keep it moving. I could tell the bag was still full when the assistant took it off.
The vet came back with two shots, an antibiotic and a steroid, and quickly gave them to her and left. The bill was $99. She was so sure it was kidney failure, she never looked in Arbee's mouth, and for that I will never forgive her. But to be fair, I didn't mention that Arbee seemed to be swallowing her saliva more often and occasionally there was a fleck of brownish fluid on her chin. I think the truth was I didn't notice that until the next day, Tuesday, when I went on death watch and sat with her around the clock.
Mostly she slept or stared into space. Sometimes she lifted her head. Her ears would rotate a little when there was a new sound. She didn't die Monday, and didn't improve any despite the fluids -- or lack thereof -- or the shots. Tuesday I started looking up mobile vets, and my web browser sent one of them a blank email from me, even though I didn't recall pushing any Send buttons. They emailed me back if I needed their services. I said no, I thought my cat was within two hours of dying naturally.
But she wasn't. She lasted all through Tuesday, and it was the longest day of my entire life. I would look at the clock and not believe it. How could it only be an hour later? Once she got up and wobbled to the back door when I let the other cats out. It was so cold, I couldn't let her go, but I bundled her up in a blanket and we walked around the yard. I got down on what was left of the grass in February and let her smell it, but she didn't want to eat any of it. When my back was turned, she got off the sofa and moved to the floor. She would make her way to the nearest water bowl, drink a lot, and then just collapse out of exhaustion. Another time, she tried to jump back up on the sofa and got her claws stuck and just hung there. I don't know how long it was before I noticed, but it made me nearly hysterical. She couldn't be left alone for a minute.
Someone on my Facebook page I didn't know well posted, "How long are you going to let that cat suffer?" It was like a knife in my heart and I immediately unfriended him, but he was right.
Tuesday night, I set up the futon of death where I had slept with Merly the last three nights of her life, letting her suffer as well. We had the electric blanket, the space heater, puppy pads under her hindquarters and head for any leakage. She hadn't moved from a sideways position since 11 p.m., and never would again. I had a little lantern at the head of the futon, barely working, but just enough light that I could watch for death to cross her face. It was then I noticed the swallowing motions she made every five minutes or so, and the brownish liquid at the corner of her mouth. I noticed a fleck of blood on her paw, and a reddish stain on the puppy pad. She must be bleeding inside her mouth.
My mind raced all night, trying to figure out what to do. Go back to the vet and insist they look in her mouth? That it's just a cut, and they can fix that and she'll be able to eat again and all will be well! But that would mean another two hours in the waiting room. Where could I get an appointment and get in right away? Had she been without solid food for so long now, it was too late to bring her back? The damage was done?
At 4 a.m., I heard my husband upstairs getting ready for work, so I bundled Arbee up and moved to my bed. The futon was too uncomfortable and I still thought she was close to death and we would nap it out. She was so still, I thought she was gone for sure, or minutes away. My husband came in to say goodbye and she flicked her tail. It broke my heart and devastated him. He left for work so quickly, I didn't realize he was gone.
I couldn't sleep, and Arbee couldn't die. The hours ticked by and she was still breathing. Now I was making her suffer. Years passed, and it was only 8:30 a.m., and the vets were beginning to open, so I started calling. I was too ashamed -- and still mad -- to go to my favorite vet, so I called a new one that had just opened. Maybe they didn't have much business yet and could take me immediately so we didn't have to wait in a room full of barking dogs for two hours. But the one vet on duty was going into surgery and they could not accommodate a new patient, even for an urgent euthanasia. "Have a great day," the receptionist said, ending the call.
Really?
As soon as the sun came up, I had moved Arbee into her favorite spot in the sunroom, with the heating pads and the puppy pads, another blanket tucked up to her chin. She tilted her head upward just a little toward the morning light. I had brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, warmed up blankets in the dryer to line a box so we could go to the emergency vet, but I was doing it all in slow motion. I hated the emergency vet. They were expensive, and the first thing they did was separate you from your pet. You sat in a cushy little private room while your pet was in the cold, clinical, stainless steel exam room where you could not go, and you would wait for hours. I was terrified they would take Arbee from me and run all kinds of expensive, horrible tests on her before agreeing that she needed to be euthanized. But it was starting to look like my only option.
Suddenly my husband appeared in the room as if he had beamed in from the Enterprise. I hadn't heard him come in. He was just there. He said he came home to get something for work, but took one look at Arbee and said call someone! Get that mobile vet over here now! I had called at 7 a.m., but got the answering machine and I didn't leave a message. This time they answered. I told them my cat was dying and needed help. They said their morning was booked, maybe this afternoon? I mentioned I was the one who sent the blank email yesterday. She remembered. She asked where I lived. I told her, and they said -- much to my surprise -- they'd be there in an hour.
The decision was made.
My husband left to go back to work, and I ran around the house, vacuuming, making the bed, getting ready for company as quickly as I could. The phone rang. My husband had called his boss and told him he wasn't coming back to work and was coming back home. He said he'd be there before the mobile vet arrived.
But they beat him to my house by 10 minutes. I don't know how or why they got there so fast. Two young women came in. I signed a paper quickly and handed over my credit card while the vet looked at Arbee, who still had not moved. She sized the situation up immediately. There was a lesion in her mouth. She said the name of it, but my mind blanked it out. Probably something like a gingival squamous cell carcinoma. I did hear her say it was not uncommon in old cats, and there was nothing you could do for it. Nothing. This was the right and only thing. My husband had magically appeared in the room again and sat next to Arbee.
"First we're going to sedate her, and we'll step out of the room and you can say your goodbyes, take as long as you want," she said. No, no, I could hear myself say. She's suffering. Do it now. Now that I knew what had been happening, that she had been swallowing blood for the last few days, that she was starving and couldn't eat for the last five, and was too weak to care that four people and four other cats were all in the same room staring at her -- just 10 days before when one person she didn't know came into the sunroom, she had run out -- I wanted it to end as soon as possible. I had done this horrible thing to her by not euthanizing her Monday morning when I had the chance. I had caused her all this horrible pain, this horrible death.
My husband kept his hands on her, but I had stepped back in revulsion at myself for what I had done and didn't see the sedation shot. I thought the big needle the vet inserted into her side and slowly injected was the sedation shot and the death fluid would come next in an IV bag, but that was the shot. When she pulled it away, she said, "That was quick, she's gone already. But I'll stay awhile to make sure." Arbee gasped and a blob of blood popped out of her mouth. I cried she was still alive, but the vet and my husband both said it was just a reflex action. Arbee was gone. They took a paw print in a wad of clay, gave me a receipt, and packed up their things. I was grateful beyond measure for their quick and kind service, and for finally telling me what was wrong with Arbee and pretending like there would have been nothing I could have done to prevent it.
(And reading up about oral cancers in cats, I can only conclude trying to treat it would have been more horrifying and painful for her then how she died.)
So for the sixth time since 1996, I lined a box with towels and kept an eye on her as she hardened into a rock, and kept asking my husband, are we sure she's dead? I don't want to bury her alive. And he would say he was sure. (When my first cat died in 1996, I took the corpse to the vet before I could bury her.) We collected our tools and gloves and headed out to his mother's house in the country and put Arbee in the ground next to Merly and Red. I looked forward to going to work the next day, to step into my other life where there are no cats, but it snowed that night and work was canceled. I had held it together all day on Wednesday. I had accepted the blame and choked it back, but alone in the house, it finally exploded into a hour of sobbing and gasping I could not stop.
I could not stop until I looked over at Neelix, who was on his 16th month of survival with a cancerous tumor on the side of his nose; Neelix, my now oldest cat; Neelix, the next cat I was going to make suffer because I would not know when the right moment was that quality of life ends and true suffering begins. I wait until my own true suffering begins, which is not fair, not right.
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