Oliver

At first, we were all in despair. He was miserable in my parents' home, walking around making these piercing meows and hiding behind the boiler in the laundry room. However, after a few days of this he came out and had a big purring and petting session with my mom and that was the turning point. My mother told me that one day she was in the kitchen and when she took a step back she tripped over him. When they'd recoved from the shock, my mother congratulated him, since this was the first time that he was comfortable enough to get underfoot.

When my parents left for their sabbatical and I moved into their house we went through the same thing to a lesser extent, even though I'd been around the house quite a bit, but he soon accepted me. The bonus came when I started letting him roam the house at night. My parents were locking him up in the laundry room at night because otherwise he would walk the house and make a lot of noise. But he obviously hated being locked in there (it got to the point where he would be very careful about walking across in front of me because then I'd be able to pick him up), so I tried leaving him out and he was fine. I guess he just needed some more time to adjust. He drove me nuts sometimes by scratching the wall in the laundry room, but I fixed that by putting a bucket in front of the scratching spot. He would come and sleep on the bed with me and we became better friends.

In fact, writing this, I realize how much more we'd bonded since those first few months. I think he was also more tractable when he got sick because he wasn't feeling well, but he was really surprisingly accommodating when it came time to syringe feed him, take his temperature, bundle him in to the cat carrier and other unpleasant tasks.

The first sign that anything was wrong was that he was limping, apparently on his right front foot. I checked the foot very carefully, and then the other one and couldn't find anything. I had a hard time checking his back feet and he really hated to be picked up so it seemed he was sore behind too. I made an appointment with a vet for the next day, and then ended up going to the animal hospital that night. That was the start. All we could find there was a fever and slight dehydration. He stayed at the hospital for two days and then his fever came down a bit and he came home. He seemed all right. He was getting oral antibiotics. At this point I was scheduled to go to Holland for two weeks to visit my parents and the ticket could not be changed or cancelled. I actually checked to see if my insurance accepted pet illness as a family emergency, but it didn't. Some insurance. So I got a friend who Oliver was fairly comfortable with to take over his care and went.

While I was away, he was kind of hiding from Zac, but he was getting his medication all right and he was eating and drinking, so everything seemed fine. However, when I got back I only had to take one look at him to know that he wasn't the cat he should be. I could tell by feeling him that he'd lost a lot of weight, and that he wasn't acting quite right. His meow didn't sound right, and he wasn't active enough. On top of that he had a lump on his shoulder that shouldn't be there. Since I was in something of a fragile state anyway after being up for some thirty hours, as well as bearing considerable latent guilt over leaving him when he was sick in the first place, I didn't take this very well. I tried not to sound accusing, but poor Zac got a phone call where about the second sentence out of my mouth was "How long has he been like this?".

Not that things could have gone any other way. It would have been hideously expensive for me to come back sooner, hard for Zac to start taking action in my place, and terrible for me to know something was wrong and not be able to do anything about it. Plus, it was something that only someone who knew the cat pretty well could see. As it was I had a really good visit with my parents in Amsterdam and I don't want the events that came after to cloud over that.

So we went through more diagnosis and put him on antibiotics again. There was some hell with bad-tasting antibiotics in liquid form that had to be washed down with water. Then we added another antibiotic in pill form, which isn't fun, and that made him stop eating altogether. The last two days it was twice a day: wrap the cat in a towel. Give him a pill. Then give him half a cc. of really awful antibiotic. He's looking wild-eyed, spitting, and drooling. Then syringe feed him about 20ml of water. This may not seem like much but it does take a few minutes to get in, and by that time he's climbing out of the towel. The last night of this I got seriously concerned about his water intake and got up every three hours to syringe feed him water, which he bitterly protested. I was also trying to get some pureed cat food into him, because a cat who fasts completely can mobilize his fat stores too quickly and damage his liver. That (if) this didn't happen, it's a miracle, given the amount of weight that he did lose.

Fortunately his temperature was down and they were able to operate. At this point we thought the most likely thing was the lump was due to peniculitis. If I understand right (I was never listening at my best when I heard this stuff) this is due to the body encapsulating some kind of infection and building layers of tissue and fluid around it. This would explain both the lump and the fever and white blood cell production. The vet had also managed to suck out some fluid that she described as serous, which to me, suggested that it wasn't cancer. And last of all, it appeared to be responding to the antibiotics.

So it was real shock when she called and said that it looked like a fibrous sarcoma (cancer), and that it appeared to be spreading aggressively under the shoulder blade and towards the spine. She said that in addition to the fluid-filled section there was a highly vascular section, and that she'd gotten a few other doctors to look at it and everyone agreed that it looked like cancer. She told me that she'd only been able to remove about 60-70% of it, and that the best remission she'd seen with this type of cancer was on a cat with a better removal operation, and that cat lived a year and a half. And last of all she said that he was still asleep and asked if I wanted her to wake him up or not.

Now, ever since, I've been second-guessing the decision I made at this point. I think the main reason I told her to go ahead and wake him up was because I just wasn't ready for the decision. I was looking for a miracle cure. Or at least a decent remission. There are drugs to slow these cancers down, and to a certain extent they do work. If we could get a year, or even a few months of healthy painless remission, I felt that would be worth it. The prognosis was worse than for the cat who had the year and a half remission, but I had as secret weapon a Shaolin monk and chinese medicine practitioner who cured his sister's cat of feline leukemia when this cat had been given up for hopeless. I felt as if I should wait for the pathology results so we could be 100% sure. I didn't want to just throw away the possibility of a year or so of good life. I decided I would leave it up to him. If he wanted to live, I would support him as much as I could. If he didn't want to live, he would let us know somehow. We could give him minimal antibiotics for a few days and then small doses of the anti-tumour drug and see what happened.

And last of all, I misestimated the cost of waking him up. Not so much in hospital bills, although there's always that, but in pain and terror for the cat. He ended up staying in the hospital overnight again and I can only hope he was mercifully groggy for most of that time, since he was never happy there surrounded with strangers and dogs.

He came home last night, having started eating, finally, at the same time that he was given an appetite stimulant. He had a huge shaved patch over his shoulders with a long sutured cut and two pieces of hose sticking out of it. He now had several bald spots on his legs where he had had catheters for fluids and drugs. He looked awful. But I told myself that a shaved patch is just a shaved patch, and a tube is just a tube. He seemed kind of agitated. He was complaining. The hospital advised me that if I kept him as still as possible his pain should be manageable. I was beginning to freak out. I was supposed to swab off his tubes, make sure that he didn't lick his stitches, and give him a dose of antibiotics that night. I moved his litter box and food into the spare bedroom and put the matress on the floor so he wouldn't be jumping. I barricaded off the walk-in closet so that he wouldn't be able to go in there and hide. And I was feeling so stressed out and lonely that I called Zac and asked him to come over and keep me company.

It's tremendously stressful to be taking care of a sick animal. It's a heavy responsibility and you have a huge emotional investment in the outcome. You hate to see them suffering and you have to do things to them that they find painful or extremely unpleasant. You have to try to figure out what's going on with them and make judgement calls about when to get more help. You have to make decisions about how far you're willing to go to try and help them. You can get pretty lonely and it's enormously helpful to have a friend around to support you. Plus a second pair of hands makes things like taking temperatures and giving pills a lot easier. Best of all, even though your friend cares about your pet, they're not as emotionally bonded to them and so they're usually a little calmer about things.

So Zac and I made ourselves comfortable in the improvised cat care room and thought soothing thoughts, and Oliver came and snuggled into my armpit. I covered him up with a fleece because he was missing his jacket as it were and he stretched his neck out and settled his head on my shoulder in that way that an affectionate cat will. This lasted about two hours and was the last quality time together that we really had. I snuck out and had a bite to eat and got ready for bed, and then tried to sleep for a bit without moving while Oliver slept beside me. But by three in the morning he got increasingly restless and was clearly in pain. He'd walk around a bit and complain, and then settle down again, but it got worse and worse and by the next day he was clearly very unhappy and we were desperate.

I called up the animal hospital again and got into discussion for what it would take to get some pain medication. My vet isn't in. Not sure where Oliver's file is. Can't prescribe meds over the phone. Will call vet at home. Will get back to you, but maybe not for another two hours. Can bring him in and get the vet on call to look at him. I'm surprised and disappointed that they hadn't foreseen the possibility of this happening and put out a prescription in case I needed it, but possibly Oliver's surgery was unusually invasive. And it was probably aggravated more than usual because of where it was. Or it was the remnants of the tumour acting up. I know that when my other cat Elf was spayed she seemed to be pain-free even less time after the operation so maybe this was difficult to foresee.

At any rate, I was now looking at travelling with Oliver again, possibly admitting him into the hospital again, giving him more medication, and most likely having a certain amount of pain leak through the medication. Possibly another loss of appetite from the medication. And all this with thirty or forty percent remaining of a very aggressive tumour that had gone from nothing to huge in two weeks. So I decided that this was the time to stop. The only thing that made this hard was that Oliver was still eating, through all of this. Whether this was because the appetite stimulant was still working or because he really felt better I'll never know. It's possible that if we'd toughed out the wait to get some painkillers and toughed out the medicine administration with the sore shoulder that we would have gotten a good remission, but I for one just couldn't take it anymore. It was more important to me that he not suffer than that I have him with me. I can only hope that that was what he wanted too.

So Zac and I put him in the carrier for the last time and brought him into the hospital yet again, and had him put to sleep. It happened amazingly quickly, with a sedative first, and then a barbiturate. His head got heavy on my hand, and after a minute the vet reported that she couldn't hear a heartbeat. After a few rounds of nose-blowing (there's nothing like having a really bad cold and doing a lot of crying), we carefully bundled the limp body into his towel and into the cat carrier, with a few apologies to him when it was awkward (it's surprising how much even a resisting cat is helping you get him into the carrier). We took him home, and I took the bandage off his foot and carefully pulled the drainage tube out of his wound while Zac dug a hole under the pear tree. We wrapped him up carefully in the ancient towel that had been his since his last owner, with his favourite ball wrapped up with him and buried him under the tree. I hate to think of the cold and the wet and I just want to stroke his fur once more, but I know it's just a body. It's not him.

I slept for a while because physically I was wiped out. Then I spent some time packing up his stuff, cleaning, and tidying up. The whole house is full of his presence, and that's fine, but if I come across something forlorn and forgotten like a food dish under the dining room table or a toy under the couch, those things are so unexpected and sharply sad that it's like a glass shard through the heart. Better to get everything at once and pack it up so I know where it is.

In closing, if anyone ever reads this far, a quote from Sandman that I think says it all about loss, although in the story he's talking about a far more terrible loss than mine:

"And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on." The Song of Orpheus

May 7, 2001
Thanks to everyone who was involved. Zac for taking care of Oliver while I was away and for encouraging me. And most of all for coming over that last night and supporting my decision and coming along at the end. Dr. Rickman for taking calls at home about the case and taking the time to explain everything very carefully. The staff at the hospital were patient, knowledgeable, sympathetic and helpful. My parents for being supportive again and my mom for telling me to take care of myself. And thanks to Don and Shirley for their compassion and prayers and for finding the time to come over and see Oliver.

The last update is that the vet called to see how I was doing and tell me that the pathology report did confirm the diagnosis. She told me that she thought I'd made a good decision for him, and that she'd heard of these tumours growing by centimeters in a matter of days.

May 26, 2001
Well, now I'm back from my conference, over my cold, and rested up. The house is empty without him, but I'm remembering him happily for the most part. Reminders are welcome, whether they're his hairs on my fleece or his clean food dishes on the kitchen counter.

A friend who lost a cat a while ago recommended telling stories about the departed, and I thought of one of my favourite moments with Oliver. One night I'd settled into bed and he was somewhere else in the house. He didn't normally come when called, but I just softly said something, and I heard an answering "mrrp?" from the living room, and then thump, pad, pad, pad, pad, pad... hop, purrrr... and he was climbing over my legs and walking up the bed to settle down next to me. I guess animals can have ulterior motives for sucking up, just like humans, but somehow when an animal goes out of his way just to be near me, sometimes without even wanting any stroking, it means a lot. They're not doing it to be polite, or because they're maintaining the relationship, they're just there because they want to be near you.

Another thing that I really remember about Oliver is how athletic he was. One time last summer my parents and I were having dinner on the back lawn. We were having cherries for dessert and Oliver was wandering the garden. We were throwing our pits into the strawberry plants, and Oliver was fascinated by these small disturbances in the plants. As he was stalking closer, my dad threw a pit that landed quite close beside him. Oliver instantly jumped straight up with all four feet, turned ninety degrees in the air, and came down facing the spot where the cherry pit had landed in the plants. It was magnificent (and pretty funny). Another time I came home after dark and he was still outside. I went around the back to put my bicycle away, and then closed the gate behind me on my way to the front door because I wanted Oliver to stay away from the road. I heard a scrabbling behind me and there he was balancing on top of this very skinny gate that's almost as high as I am tall. I don't know how he did it.

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