Cat trouble
Back in March we had to have one of our cats put to sleep. We found her on the bedroom floor, panting and coughing up foamy spittle, her eyes were glazed and she didn't respond to touch. The vet suggested that she'd had a huge heart attack and, seeing she was a cat of advanced age, there was nothing they could do. So we did the humane thing and had her put to sleep, watching her as she slipped peacefully away.
Her sister has always been a small cat, but over the last few weeks we've noticed how little food she's been eating and how much water she's been drinking. She has lost a lot of what little weight she had. She's now really bony to the touch.
Days would go by where she wouldn't eat her food. We tried countless different brands, different types of food; mousse, paté, chunks in jelly/gravy, tinned tuna (in water, not brine), even cooking up & shredding a chicken breast. The Felix "As Good As It Looks" in gravy would be devoured in the morning, but ignored the next day. The shredded chicken would be refused despite being a hit two days previous. It was perplexing and frustrating. She was hungry but she didn't seem to want to eat.
I noticed that she loved those treats that were just thin tubes of runny goo, so bought a baby food purée blender thing with a view to whizzing the chunks into a purée that would be easy on her teeth (we suspected that it was a mouth issue as bad teeth were mentioned in a previous vet visit).
She didn't like puréed food of any description.
In desperation we took her to the vet, they ran blood & urine tests and discovered a whole list of problems; bad teeth, anaemia, kidney disease, heart murmur, hyperthyroidism and a mass in her stomach.
It is a bind, the vet can't give her pain relief for her teeth as that will accelerate her kidney problems, she can't have dental work because she's anaemic, there's no guarantee she will eat the food that will control her kidney trouble and hyperthyroidism is very expensive to control.
If we could get her to eat her kidney friendly diet, resolve her anaemia and get her teeth done, there's still the question of the mass in her abdomen. If it's an aggressive tumour, then all our work (and expenditure) on rectifying her existing problems will be for nothing.
She is 19 years old.
I asked the vet "What kind of owners would we be if we just did nothing?" The vet offered the opinion that it could well be the best option. Just give her as much love and attention as she wants and as many treats as she wants and enjoy her company whilst we still can.
My parents and my in-laws both had dogs who had ailing health in later life. They kept these dogs alive on various treatments for ages. The dogs were bloated, unresponsive and immobile, needing constant care for their ailments. It was as if they were being kept alive purely because my parents didn't want to let them go.
For some people, pets are their children. You see folk online talking about their "fur babies", carrying them around in purses, dressing them up, acting as if they were four legged human children.
I worked with someone who put their small, middle aged dog through radio and chaemotherapy, the dog was so sick they pushed it round in a child's stroller. I couldn't do that. I guess I am old-fashioned. Pets are not children to me. Pets are pets. They are companions. Yes, they are an object of love, but not like people.
I could write a massive angry paragraph about how vets are just a business, designed to extract as much money from your attachment to your pet as possible, prices inflated massively by the grasping insurance industry, but I won't.
Pets teach us how to love. They teach us how to grieve. Pets are pets, they're not people.
When our old girl is ready to go, we will do the decent thing. Until then we will love her and spoil her. That's the best we can do.