Honey is Gone

In the past seven hours, I attempted the impossible 11 times.  I started to check on or look for my sick cat, Honey.  It was impossible because I had her euthanized eight hours ago.

Honey was only nine years old.  She had been basically healthy her whole live although I let her gain too much weight and she developed an arthritis problem, but it was getting better—at least in how it affected her—as she lost the weight.  In July her weight finally got back down to the top of her target range—11 pounds.  This was major progress and it showed up in her behavior.  She was running around like when she was young and had resumed jumping onto high things.  The diet would continue until she got down to 10 pounds but this was a victory—if only my diet was going so well.

Alas, this turned out to be a false victory.  In August she stopped finishing her meals. A few weeks later she stopped eating the dry food which had always been her favorite.  I took her to see the vet.  We thought that she might have an infected tooth—she had one a few years ago and, thereafter, the vet put her under to perform a thorough cleaning of her teeth every September.  I sort of expected the vet to tell me that it would have to happen more often.

Instead, on 15 September, I was awakened by a phone call telling me Honey had a tumor in her tongue.  It was going to keep growing making it tougher and tougher for her to eat.  Eventually, she would have to be force fed.  Even if I did that, she would eventually not be able to breath.  The vet said we had anywhere from a week to two months left.

Honey was never going to tolerate force feeding so the two months was never realistic.  I brought her home to enjoy our remaining time.  I made a bigger effort to ensure that she ate and it worked for a while.  The first ten days were great.  Her weight was down to 8.5 pounds so she was full of energy and jumping, running, and playing even more than in July and August.  She continued to enjoy all her favorite activities except eating hard food.  During the next 11 days she went erratically downhill.  Her grooming declined which looked strange because she was always a very clean cat.  She rarely needed to use the litter box and she was less interested in sitting in my lap or having her head rubbed.   She began to drool more and more.

It was not straight downhill.  As recently as this past Saturday she ate more than she had eaten in a couple of months.  But that was the last day she ate much of anything.  By Monday it was clear that she was not going to have any more good days so I made the appointment.

I probably should have taken her to the vet to check things out a couple of weeks sooner, but I had out of town trips scheduled and, as it turned out, it would have made no difference in the outcome—only in how long I would know what was coming.  I would have stayed home with her and missed my annual vacation and my 40th high school reunion.  That wouldn’t really have helped.

Almost everyone’s cat is wonderful.  That is why they make great pets.  There is no point is trying to convince anyone that Honey was especially wonderful.  But she was well suited to me.

She adapted to living in her new home completely with only one night (her second) of discomfort with her new environment.  She was a lap cat who just liked to hang around me.  Since I wanted a lap cat who would tolerate me reading or working while she sat or slept on my lap this was perfect.  She was pretty vocal, which was necessary to get my attention sometimes, but I was rarely in doubt as to what she wanted from me.  And for the past eight years whenever I was heading home, whether it was from the store or an out of town trip, I was always smiling because I was going to get to see her soon.  I was going to be able to open my front door and shout “Hi Honey. I’m home.”

Since this is supposed to be a Southampton football blog, I suppose I should mention that we had a little football based tradition.  I often watched our games on my Ipad with Honey on my lap.  When the game got exciting and I reacted, she was not pleased.  So I started rewarding her with her favorite treats whenever we scored.  Unfortunately, the last time she could eat them was during our draw with Newcastle.  By the time of our Norwich victory, she had stopped eating hard food.

Honey was clearly ready to go yesterday.  After she was unconscious, we looked at her tongue and it had literally started to fall apart in the last three days.  She was ready to fall asleep in my arms for the last time.