My cat has been very sick for a couple of months now and I'm starting to accept that he's not going to live much longer.
He's about eight years old and has been sick for seven of those years. I first got him and his siblings when he was about a year old, because he'd gotten a bad sinus infection and my parents were going to be out of town and couldn't look after him. I didn't think he was going to survive then, but after taking him to the vet and giving him the closest thing I could to intensive care at home, he eventually made a recovery. He ended up blind in one eye and has had permanent sinus drainage that no vet was ever able to fix with any combination of medication. I learned to live with it though and nicknamed him Sniffles.
What started with what I suspected to be a simple ear infection has gone on to be two months of giving him four different oral medications, some twice a day, with only brief periods of one to two days of any improvement in his condition amidst a general decline. He's very lethargic now, eats very little and given that no medication has helped so far I have little hope that he'll recover. He's scheduled for a CT scan in two days for possible nasal polyps causing the sinus drainage, but I'm not sure that even if it's confirmed that it would mean much. I'm not sure he'd even survive surgery for it, and even if he did, I don't know if he'd recover from whatever else is going wrong with his sinuses and ears.
I'm trying to take some solace in that I've given him the best life I could for as long as I could, but it still hurts. A lot.
Clyde passed this afternoon. He suffered a major blockage somewhere in his lower body from a blood clot, probably brought on by dehydration, and we had to put him down. He was in severe pain and nothing could be done for him.
That was easily the hardest thing I've ever been part of. My brother held him while they administered the drugs.
I didn't expect him to live nearly as long as he did, and he did better than I ever thought he would. We ended up spending a frankly embarrassing amount of money trying to save him. The CT scan was only the beginning, but since that confirmed no signs of cancer we moved on to trying other things. The scan confirmed fluid buildup in his ears, so we scheduled a procedure to have them drained, which took weeks to get. In the meantime he continued to do worse so we had a feeding tube put in so he'd avoid losing too much weight. 3 days later they had to remove it because it was causing irritation of his esophagus and causing vomiting and other distress.
When he finally had his ears drained, he was like a new cat for a couple of days. He was eating and acting like his old self. But... it was just too late. He'd lost so much weight he was becoming cachectic. He was chronically dehydrated and suffering kidney dysfunction, leading to progressive anemia. He quickly stopped eating and drinking again and suffered a mild stroke. The doctors kept him for 3 days before releasing him yesterday. Today, he had another stroke, and it was clear nothing would help.
He died too young, but at least I think he knew he was loved for those 8 years.
Author
Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9500151 times)