Friday, September 11, 2009

N=1 - R.I.P. Autoimmune cat

We lost our beloved George today. Some of you have asked about him lately, cuz I wrote about him earlier in the year. In short, our 14 year old cat became ill this winter, possibly with an autoimmune type disease, at about the time my PsA was flaring and my husband's Crohn's was acting up. I've been trying to connect the dots between the three of us and our diseases, to no avail. Sadly, this week, he got too frail and dehydrated to have any quality of life anymore, and we took him in this morning to be put down.

My husband and I have had a lot of talks about euthanasia these last few days, as we've had to make this decision. When are you, or your animal, too sick to go on? How much pain is too much pain? What is quality of life? Both of us are looking at a future of increasingly bad health... but we don't want to be "put down" (or at least we can't imagine wanting to be). Why is euthanasia o.k. with an animal and not a human? When is it o.k. with a human?

I have no answers, no strong stance to take today. Just a few tears, and a little clump of white fur, shaved from George's leg before they gave him the injection. I stole it from the procedure table before we left the room - it's sitting forlornly on my desk, in a ziploc. How un-ceremonial.

He'll be missed. He was family.

1 comment:

  1. glad you're back to posting. I haven't looked at your blog for a while, but saw it today and was happy.

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