so it goes
At about ten o'clock tonight, my family's cat, Patches, was put to sleep.
She was about twenty years old, and we'd had her ever since she was a tiny kitten, and most of my life. The past couple years she'd been losing more and more of her sight, to say nothing of her hearing. She went from being a rambunctious, kittenish outside cat to a crotchety inside cat, but I really can't be too upset about it, because she also very much became "my" cat over the past few years, even though I was never really the one who fed her or cleaned her box or any of that. I was very rough with her when I was little and she was a kitten, but because of that she's always put up with more from me than from anyone else. During the past year or so this became more and more apparent - she'd only really sleep on my bed or on one of the couches, and if anyone else tried to pick her up, she'd complain like the dickens.
At some point today she injured her back right leg somehow, and possibly some of the others as well. This morning she could walk, by two in the afternoon she was limping, and by seven she couldn't even stand anymore. Which meant that she really couldn't use a litter box, or walk anywhere, and while we tried to make a nice little nest for her on the kitchen floor, it wasn't her cat nest on the couch, so it just wasn't right. She wasn't happy.
The APUs let me hold her in my lap on the way to the vet, and for a while in the waiting room as well. I had to give her to the VAP to hold after that, though, since I had Latin I needed to work on. After an hour and half, two hour wait we finally got into a room, and the vet looked her over. She was very grumpy, growling whenever she was moved, and while the vet wanted to do all these tests, the APUs said that she was an old cat, she really wasn't happy with her life anymore between blindness, deafness, and general pain, it would just be best for her to be put to sleep. We were led to another room, and the APUs took care of paper work while Patches got a catheter put in in another room. Eventually she was brought back to us, and I was allowed to hold her while the vet put in the stuff to put her to sleep. Before the vet started, I scritched her head, and while she was about to bite me, once she'd smelled my hand and knew it was me, she licked me a whole bunch and then settled down. And that was that.
The VAP had laid down a new towel I'd gotten for Christmas and hadn't used yet on the floor of the kitchen for her earlier, and the AP insisted on bringing it along to wrap around her in addition to the older towel I'd grabbed on the way out. She kept getting her claw caught on the terry cloth because it was still so new and loose. I went ahead and left the towel at the vet, still wrapped around her.
I still have all of my Latin to translate. I just can't find it in me to do it, but it needs to get done, and I'm still on the borderline of failing the class. I just want to sleep.