(no subject)

[fadeaccompli]

I am worried about Aubrey. I mean...okay. It is long past the point of "worrying" because we know she's got terminal cancer. Her skin lumps are myriad and ever-growing. She's losing little clumps of fur constantly. She bleeds on things to the point that she's confined to the bathroom. But she still seeks out affection, and wails at the door if she doesn't get enough of it, and eats her food and uses her litterbox and begs for fresh water.

But...she's started throwing up a lot. Occasional food barfing is standard to cats, and not to be worried about. Occasional hairball horking, ditto. But she threw up three times yesterday, all watery stuff, with only one of those being plausibly hairball-related, and then again this morning. And she's started huddling more.

...but then half an hour later she's all whiny and affectionate and rubs her head against the faucet until we run water for her. So it doesn't seem like she's in such misery that I need to fix things. And let's be honest, here: by "fix things" I mean "put her to sleep" (which is such a terrible weasely euphemism itself), because there is no fixing this problem. Even palliative care wasn't palliating much. But it's so hard to tell with cats, and. And. I don't know. I don't want to let her go too long to assuage my own guilt. I don't want to end things too soon just to be over the uncertainty.

Cats. Hard to care for properly, sometimes.

Comments

[ziz]

Sympathy. Lots of sympathy.

Twilight crashed hard from renal failure - could barely walk, fell over in his litterbox and urinated on himself and just stayed there, curled up on the bathroom mat and urinated on himself again, didn't even make a single peep of complaint as we hauled him to the vet. I tried to make my peace with losing him even before we took him to the vet (and it didn't work). The vet didn't think he had as much as three months left. (It's a year later, and he's as loud and obnoxious and whiny and needy and snuggly and clumsily energetic as he ever was, except that we have to feed him canned food with drugs in and give him subcutaneous hydration every day.)

If he hadn't responded so well to treatment, we would have had to have him euthanized - it was obvious that his quality of life was completely nonexistent at that point. I really don't know what I'd do in your case with Aubrey, though. Hold vigil with her for a couple of days and see if she's really living well aside from the falling-apart bits or if she's just perking up whenever you're around, I think, but then who knows.

Throwing up a bunch of watery stuff repeatedly and frequently is often a sign of (or an exacerbator of, in some cases) impending kidney failure, for what it's worth.

I always feel awfully insensitive when I'm talking about other people's pets' health. I'm sorry if I might have come across that way - I don't honestly know if I do. If so, it's because I'm just trying to keep my own sleeve-heart from bleeding all over you.

[fadeaccompli]

We got a 3-4 month diagnosis when we took Aubrey to the vet, and decided not to give her certain drugs because trying to force them on her made her so unhappy, and she didn't respond to the drugs at all. And for the last month I was thinking, hey, sure, she's bleeding and lumpy and leaky, but she seems happy anyway!

...but now I'm not so sure. But not sure enough in the other direction to really be able to tell. And, no, it's not insensitive at all. I appreciate getting more information, because it'll help me make the right decision for her.

[ziz]

If you can get your drugs as injectables (or even suppositories) rather than as pills / liquid, you might have better luck. It's surprisingly easy to get to the point where you can shove a needle in a cat with essentially no distress to you or the cat (and who doesn't want an excuse to have a sharps container around the house? but tip: find out about disposal /first/. Get one with a prepaid return box, and get a needle snipper so you can put just the metal points of needles rather than the whole needle assembly in the container - it saves a huge amount of space.)

Cats try their damndest to hide being sick from you. It's so very inconvenient.

[fadeaccompli]

There was an every-three-weeks injection that we stopped going for because it involved the poor cat stuffed in a box for an hour one way and half an hour the other. Very unhappy kitty. And it just didn't seem to help any. But then, it might've been slowing things without stopping them in a way we couldn't tell.

[ziz]

Holy cow, no kidding - I meant "doing injections yourself at home". We had to drag Twilight in for (daily!) IV hydration for the first two weeks, and although it certainly saved his life, he was about ready to murder us all in our sleep by the end of it.

[kore]

I read your later post, so your kitty's gone, but -

I don't want to let her go too long to assuage my own guilt. I don't want to end things too soon just to be over the uncertainty.

Yeah. Right before we took Tania to the vet that one last time, it was so hard to figure out what was going on because she was obviously terribly ill - looking glazed all the time, paws curling in, eating almost nothing, going downhill super fast - but she still wanted lots of pets, and was eating by herself, and jumping down from her cat bed on our bed to wobble over to the catbox (which was sort of like an 80-year-old grandma winning the Boston Marathon, but I digress). And a couple of vets and some dear friends all said the same thing, with so limited a period of time, it's better to let her go out on a good (or goodish) day rather than wait until she starts really crashing and it's awful and a crisis situation. So it definitely sounds like you did the right thing (which you know, but yeah - it's just such an awful torn feeling).

[fadeaccompli]

Damn. Thank you. It really helped to hear this. The vet asked all sorts of questions--in the nicest way--about what we'd done with her before actually agreeing to put her to sleep, and much as he did say it sounded like the right choice, I just...wondered. If we could've found a way to give her more shots ourselves (well, myself: the spouse can't even be around needles), or waited longer to be really sure, or... I don't know. And as soon as he gave her the first shot, which was just the sedative, she lept up and went to eat kibble for the first time in more than a day.

But I am glad she got to have a little kibble, and less pain--I'm guessing that's why she ate again, after refusing even water all day--before she went, rather than letting her suffer longer just to be sure. Sigh.

[kore]

Aww, I'm glad it helped....and yeah, it was really really hard. T and I had analytically discussed what we should do much earlier, and we'd both agreed that if it came down to it we didn't want her to live in pain just because it would make us feel better, but....that was still a rough decision. And I felt terribly guilty afterwards (it actually helped to look at the big CRF website on the net - apparently that's really common). But it was the last thing we could give her, a peaceful way out instead of all that future pain, and it was for her, not for us, so that helped.