TW: pet sickness & loss

Tl;dr skip to the last paragraph

In October, I had to put my childhood cat down. I was about 8 when I got her, and she was truly my best friend; I had her to come home to after almost every milestone, including my first heartbreak, first car, graduation, two surgeries, first day of post-secondary and post-secondary graduation, my first house, and my engagement.

After we moved into my first house, she struggled with diarrhea and keeping weight on. She was already small—we called her Kitten because she had always been small—so there wasn’t much wiggle room to be had when it came to weight. I tried wet food, dry food, heating the wet food up, mixing the two together, and giving her as many treats as she wanted but nothing was working. Bloodwork was always clean, but eventually the vet gave us powders to add to her food too. By the time she passed away, she had a fibre powder, a nutritional powder, a probiotic powder, and I was forcing NutriCal on her (a high calorie paste usually for after a surgery, when pets can’t really get up to eat). Genuinely, nothing was working.

Then, one day my fiancé told me she was “walking funny.” By the time I turned around to look, everything was normal. I think it was the next morning that it happened again. She started kind of keeling over as she was walking, as if her body was too heavy on the right side. I made a next-day appointment. By that night, she couldn’t walk at all. She could only stay upright if she was leaning against the wall. I had to take her to the bathroom and bring her food and water. Otherwise I made a nest and laid with her in bed.

Nowadays, I wonder if I jumped the gun, but at the time I felt like I knew this was it. In the middle of the night I took her to the bathroom and she had diarrhea and vomited, almost simultaneously. She despised the kennel/carrier so I showed up to the vet the next day with her in a cardboard box with her favourite blanket. My mom and siblings came to the vet to see her, and both commented on how skinny she was. It had become so normal to me that it felt like I was seeing her for the first time when they said that. I’m not saying I didn’t care, but I’m home with her all day every day so I guess it was harder for me to notice how bad it had gotten.

I told the receptionist that she had gotten bad enough that I doubted she would make it, and just to let the vet know that’s kind of where we were at. I’m not sure the gravity of it hit me at the time; I was sad but I remember thinking how grateful I was that something “big” had happened, rather than having to guess when enough was enough as she got older and sicker (that had already begun popping into my mind before the incident). It wasn’t until the vet administered the anesthesia and her tongue lolled out that I had this sinking feeling of, “Oh god, this is wrong, this is not Kitten, what is happening?” I after she was gone, each of my family members pet her one last time. I actually had to force myself to do it because I was scared she would be stiff and cold. It was almost worse that she felt like normal.

I’ve had a really hard time since then. My birthday was a week later, and it was the first one I celebrated without her. Then I got married, and she wasn’t there to welcome us home. Generally, I’m sad but okay—you know, the whole box-and-ball grief metaphor. However, sometimes I get these awful thoughts: I should have taken her sickness more seriously, I should have been trying to get her to eat hourly instead of every few hours, I shouldn’t have started the vet visit by saying she wasn’t going to recover, I should have ignored how much she hated the vet and took her more. I’ve also started forgetting the things I DID do; I think of the times I kicked her out of our room when she started crying at night for seemingly no reason so my fiancé could sleep, but I forget that often went out and slept on the couch with her so she wasn’t lonely.

Anyway, to cut to the question in the title… I assume it was a stroke. The vet didn’t tell me, she just said it was probably her time to go. And I think because I was googling about cat strokes, I triggered the algorithm because then a video popped up. It was of a couple who had an old cat that had a stroke, and they spared no cost and paid for it to have surgery. Some of the comments mentioned how stressful that would be on an old cat, and so I’m able to push aside the “what if?” Then I saw that often times you can get medications or other treatments for cat strokes, and they can go on to live for a few more years (though I also saw that it doesn’t really fix it, it just eases the symptoms maybe?). I feel like I have to know—how realistic was it that she could have gotten better? Did I do an awful thing by jumping to conclusions?

I just would like to know about others’ experiences with cat strokes or these kind of sudden illnesses. I’m typically a lot more logical and stoic about these things (human-loved-one death doesn’t really phase me since I feel like I generally understand that’s just how life goes, for lack of a better explanation).

P.S. cat tax still applies even though I’m sad lol