Fermat
Last weekend was the hardest one I've had in a long time. Our younger cat, Fermat (and, by younger, I mean a little over 11 years old), had been a bit reclusive lately and wasn't eating as much as normal. Friday morning, I scheduled an appointment with the vet for the afternoon. When I got into the bright lights of the vet's examination room, his skin was bright yellow, a sign of liver problems, and something that I totally couldn't see in the normal diffuse lighting of our house. He weighted in a 6 pounds, whereas last year he was 8 pounds, another thing that couldn't be seen visibly underneath his long, thick coat of hair. Cue the guilt. We've been so worried about Felix ever since his hospital visit last summer that we totally missed Fermat's slow decline (although we did take him in last summer for a full workup and he was fine at that time).
Our vet did a blood test, and we took him home, gave him 100 ml of sub-Q fluids, and fed him a half can of high protein wet cat food (the vet was later amazed that he was eating so well). We got the test results results Saturday morning. She recommended that we take him immediately to Dove Lewis for an ultrasound and IV fluids to try to combat the infection. If all went well, we could take him home on Monday morning, and continue to receive treatment from our vet.
Saturday afternoon, I got a call from Dove Lewis with his ultrasound results. He had some sort of obstruction in his gall bladder, although it didn't look like a gallstone. They didn't think that it could be fixed medically, and if we tried and the medicine didn't work, it could do more harm than good since the gallbladder wouldn't allow the medicine to be processed. If we didn't do anything, the gallbladder could rupture, and that would be Really Bad News. The vet hoped that a surgery could be fairly straightforward in which they could either remove the obstruction or remove the entire gallbladder. She seemed fairly confident that they could fix the problem. (As she was talking, I could feel my bank account bleeding. There goes my unpaid maternity leave.) Fermat is my family, and I couldn't not do anything I could to help him. So I approved the surgery, hoped for the best, and went to a horse show to watch Megan compete on Monaco (she won her class), and tried to keep myself distracted. I really wasn't super worried. We had had such a hard experience with Felix last year, but it had turned out well in the end.
I got a call that night sometime around 9pm. Fermat was in surgery and apparently he had a condition that none of the vets had ever seen before, something that was really abnormal. His bile duct was obstructed and there was some sort of fluid involved that wasn't blood and wasn't bile but something altogether different, possibly puss from an infection. He also had a thickening of the tissue at the entrance to the small intestine. It might be cancerous or it might be caused by the infection. Either way, there was no easy way to drain the bile in the gallbladder. They wanted to know if they could take the extra time to try to deal with the issue. If they just closed him up again, they for sure wouldn't have fixed the problem. The longer operation would probably allow them to drain the bile, taking away the immediate problem, but if that tissue was cancerous, there might not be a lot they could do.
It was a terrible choice. Prolong the operation but possibly fix the immediate problem, or close him up to figure out if the cells were cancerous and possibly subject him to a second operation, hopefully before his gallbladder ruptured. They weren't trying to push me one way or the other, but it seemed like they thought Option #1 was the better way to go. So that's what I did. I got another call around 10pm from the surgeon. The operation was complete and they did manage to drain the bile, but he had lost a lot of blood and had a hard time maintaining his blood pressure under the anathesia, making his body too cold. He was holding his own, but they were worried. Hopefully all would be well and I wouldn't get another call from them until tomorrow morning (although I could call at any time for an update.)
The phone rang again at around 11pm. I knew it was bad news when I heard the ring. Fermat wasn't doing well. He hadn't regained consciousness from the surgery and was having a hard time breathing on his own. They hadn't actually excabated the breathing tube from the surgery. His little heart, however, was beating strongly. But he was too cold and wasn't responding well enough to their heating efforts. They wanted to do a blood transfusion but weren't sure if it would be enough. I okayed it.
About a 20-30 minutes later, I got another call. The transfusion wasn't working. He wasn't making it. What did they want me to do? I asked if I could see him, and we drove to Dove Lewis. When we got there, the vet said that his heart had stopped a couple of times, but they had gotten it going again. If we wanted to see him, we had to be prepared that he was hooked up to a lot of tubes.
We went into the ER and saw our little fluffball covered with blankets and heating pads with an IV in his arm and a tube down his throat that he was gasping around. A tech was pumping air into his lungs. The vet told us very gently that they could keep doing CPR to keep him alive, but his odds of ever leaving the hospital were very, very bad. He had about the strongest heart they'd ever seen, but that it wasn't enough to make him better... he just wasn't breathing on his own, and they thought his brain could already be gone. We stroked his head and shed some tears and told them to stop the CPR. He just wasn't going to make it. I hope he knew we were there. The vet inserted something into his IV to stop his heart, and we watched him die. He had been a part of our lives since he was a four week old kitten and could fit on the palm of one hand.
They cleaned him up, took out all the tubes, and brought his body into a comfy little room where we could hold him and say our final goodbyes. It was hard. Really hard. I kept expecting him to look up and give us his cranky old man meow. We decided to have him cremated, but not privately. I just kept thinking of what I would do with the ashes... we could spread them in the backyard, but he was an indoor cat, so it didn't seem exactly fitting. Our little cat was gone and he wasn't coming back. Dove Lewis is going to send us inkings of his paw prints and a lock of his hair, and those seemed more meaningful than bits of ash.
We went home and hugged Felix and cried. Sleep was impossible. We tried for a bit, but it didn't work. I kept seeing him gasping for air around his air tube and wondering how it all happened so quickly. We never thought we'd lose Fermat like this... I had always figured that someday we would lose Felix and Fermat would be our only cat for a while.
Eventually, we gave us trying to sleep and went downstairs and watched part of a Warren Miller documentary... cool ski tricks are entertaining but mindless. And then we watched The Sixth Sense. It really is a different movie after you know about the twist that happens at the end. And then we moved onto episodes of How I Met Your Mother and watched the sun come up. Eventually, Aaron took a pill to put him to sleep, and we went upstairs for an hour or two of sleep. Sunday passed in a sleep deprived daze. The whole thing seemed like such a bad dream... I kept expecting Fermat to show up when I walked around the corner, and he kept not being there.
I kept telling myself that if he had to go, at least we knew that we did everything we could to help him, and that he wasn't suffering for very long. It would be far worse for him to recover from the surgery, but be in and out of the vet afterwards, only to die from cancer in agony. He had had a great life and was a happy cat who loved being around people (on his terms). He was friendly and social and didn't have a mean bone in his body. We had given him a good home with lots of love, even if he had to live in Felix's shadow (Felix has a huge personality and casts a large one).
I know all of these things, but they are cold comfort when all I wanted was to hold our little fluff ball and listen to him do his funny breathing thing that tells us he's not really happy with us, but is tolerating whatever we are doing to him. Or give us his old man meow (unlike Felix, he really only had one type of meow). Or attack my feet. Or get dripped on happily from his place on the bathmat in our shower. Or plop down in the middle of the kitchen so that we constantly had to step over him. Or demand that we add water to his dry cat food. Or sit down in his slumped, odd, uncatlike position. Or any of the other things that made him such a unique and special cat.
I miss you, Fermat.
Our vet did a blood test, and we took him home, gave him 100 ml of sub-Q fluids, and fed him a half can of high protein wet cat food (the vet was later amazed that he was eating so well). We got the test results results Saturday morning. She recommended that we take him immediately to Dove Lewis for an ultrasound and IV fluids to try to combat the infection. If all went well, we could take him home on Monday morning, and continue to receive treatment from our vet.
Saturday afternoon, I got a call from Dove Lewis with his ultrasound results. He had some sort of obstruction in his gall bladder, although it didn't look like a gallstone. They didn't think that it could be fixed medically, and if we tried and the medicine didn't work, it could do more harm than good since the gallbladder wouldn't allow the medicine to be processed. If we didn't do anything, the gallbladder could rupture, and that would be Really Bad News. The vet hoped that a surgery could be fairly straightforward in which they could either remove the obstruction or remove the entire gallbladder. She seemed fairly confident that they could fix the problem. (As she was talking, I could feel my bank account bleeding. There goes my unpaid maternity leave.) Fermat is my family, and I couldn't not do anything I could to help him. So I approved the surgery, hoped for the best, and went to a horse show to watch Megan compete on Monaco (she won her class), and tried to keep myself distracted. I really wasn't super worried. We had had such a hard experience with Felix last year, but it had turned out well in the end.
I got a call that night sometime around 9pm. Fermat was in surgery and apparently he had a condition that none of the vets had ever seen before, something that was really abnormal. His bile duct was obstructed and there was some sort of fluid involved that wasn't blood and wasn't bile but something altogether different, possibly puss from an infection. He also had a thickening of the tissue at the entrance to the small intestine. It might be cancerous or it might be caused by the infection. Either way, there was no easy way to drain the bile in the gallbladder. They wanted to know if they could take the extra time to try to deal with the issue. If they just closed him up again, they for sure wouldn't have fixed the problem. The longer operation would probably allow them to drain the bile, taking away the immediate problem, but if that tissue was cancerous, there might not be a lot they could do.
It was a terrible choice. Prolong the operation but possibly fix the immediate problem, or close him up to figure out if the cells were cancerous and possibly subject him to a second operation, hopefully before his gallbladder ruptured. They weren't trying to push me one way or the other, but it seemed like they thought Option #1 was the better way to go. So that's what I did. I got another call around 10pm from the surgeon. The operation was complete and they did manage to drain the bile, but he had lost a lot of blood and had a hard time maintaining his blood pressure under the anathesia, making his body too cold. He was holding his own, but they were worried. Hopefully all would be well and I wouldn't get another call from them until tomorrow morning (although I could call at any time for an update.)
The phone rang again at around 11pm. I knew it was bad news when I heard the ring. Fermat wasn't doing well. He hadn't regained consciousness from the surgery and was having a hard time breathing on his own. They hadn't actually excabated the breathing tube from the surgery. His little heart, however, was beating strongly. But he was too cold and wasn't responding well enough to their heating efforts. They wanted to do a blood transfusion but weren't sure if it would be enough. I okayed it.
About a 20-30 minutes later, I got another call. The transfusion wasn't working. He wasn't making it. What did they want me to do? I asked if I could see him, and we drove to Dove Lewis. When we got there, the vet said that his heart had stopped a couple of times, but they had gotten it going again. If we wanted to see him, we had to be prepared that he was hooked up to a lot of tubes.
We went into the ER and saw our little fluffball covered with blankets and heating pads with an IV in his arm and a tube down his throat that he was gasping around. A tech was pumping air into his lungs. The vet told us very gently that they could keep doing CPR to keep him alive, but his odds of ever leaving the hospital were very, very bad. He had about the strongest heart they'd ever seen, but that it wasn't enough to make him better... he just wasn't breathing on his own, and they thought his brain could already be gone. We stroked his head and shed some tears and told them to stop the CPR. He just wasn't going to make it. I hope he knew we were there. The vet inserted something into his IV to stop his heart, and we watched him die. He had been a part of our lives since he was a four week old kitten and could fit on the palm of one hand.
They cleaned him up, took out all the tubes, and brought his body into a comfy little room where we could hold him and say our final goodbyes. It was hard. Really hard. I kept expecting him to look up and give us his cranky old man meow. We decided to have him cremated, but not privately. I just kept thinking of what I would do with the ashes... we could spread them in the backyard, but he was an indoor cat, so it didn't seem exactly fitting. Our little cat was gone and he wasn't coming back. Dove Lewis is going to send us inkings of his paw prints and a lock of his hair, and those seemed more meaningful than bits of ash.
We went home and hugged Felix and cried. Sleep was impossible. We tried for a bit, but it didn't work. I kept seeing him gasping for air around his air tube and wondering how it all happened so quickly. We never thought we'd lose Fermat like this... I had always figured that someday we would lose Felix and Fermat would be our only cat for a while.
Eventually, we gave us trying to sleep and went downstairs and watched part of a Warren Miller documentary... cool ski tricks are entertaining but mindless. And then we watched The Sixth Sense. It really is a different movie after you know about the twist that happens at the end. And then we moved onto episodes of How I Met Your Mother and watched the sun come up. Eventually, Aaron took a pill to put him to sleep, and we went upstairs for an hour or two of sleep. Sunday passed in a sleep deprived daze. The whole thing seemed like such a bad dream... I kept expecting Fermat to show up when I walked around the corner, and he kept not being there.
I kept telling myself that if he had to go, at least we knew that we did everything we could to help him, and that he wasn't suffering for very long. It would be far worse for him to recover from the surgery, but be in and out of the vet afterwards, only to die from cancer in agony. He had had a great life and was a happy cat who loved being around people (on his terms). He was friendly and social and didn't have a mean bone in his body. We had given him a good home with lots of love, even if he had to live in Felix's shadow (Felix has a huge personality and casts a large one).
I know all of these things, but they are cold comfort when all I wanted was to hold our little fluff ball and listen to him do his funny breathing thing that tells us he's not really happy with us, but is tolerating whatever we are doing to him. Or give us his old man meow (unlike Felix, he really only had one type of meow). Or attack my feet. Or get dripped on happily from his place on the bathmat in our shower. Or plop down in the middle of the kitchen so that we constantly had to step over him. Or demand that we add water to his dry cat food. Or sit down in his slumped, odd, uncatlike position. Or any of the other things that made him such a unique and special cat.
I miss you, Fermat.