I took Julian to the vet after I got home from work and found him hiding under the day bed upstairs in the loft. His breathing was labored, and he'd been bleeding from his nose. The vet checked him out, and the diagnosis was a tumor in the sinus cavity that had started affecting his brain. That accounted for the convulsions that he went through this morning. At his age, and with the prognosis being that he'd go down rapidly, with more frequent and more violent seizures, I had the vet end it. I held him on my lap til the end, which came quick and easy.
It was almost harder coming back to the empty apartment. At least when I went through this with Mikey, Jules was waiting for me when I got back. When you're separated from you wife as I've been for over 3 years except for the occasional weekend, the guys gave me someone to talk to, to vent to without comment back, and (most important for me) someone to keep me relatively sane.
For anyone with pets, what I did today is the hardest thing you'll ever do. No matter the need, no matter that its the correct thing to do, you are intentionally ending the life of a critter that you've shared your life with for years. They will generally still be aware, still interacting with their world, and with an injection and a few seconds all of that stops. Regardless of who wielded the syringe, you just killed your pet.
So, I'm sitting here occasionally in tears,with a candle and a stick of incense burning in honor of a small gray cat that never took shit from anyone.
Vaya con Dios, little man.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
And then there were none...
Jules has taken a turn for the worse, and I'll be surprised to find him still clinging to the mortal coil when I get home from work today. He had either an epileptic seizure or a stroke this morning, and I left him sleeping when I came in to work. I really find myself hoping that nature takes care of this...having to make end-of-life decisions with 2 cats in a row, especially having lived with them for so many years, is just about too much.
More on this story as it unfolds....
More on this story as it unfolds....
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