Praline
August 1998 - April 5, 2013
For a little history: several weeks ago, I took Praline to the vet for an eye infection. When they weighed him, I was alarmed to find that he was under 10 lbs. (Praline was always - shall we say - rotund, weighing in at around 17 lbs for most of his adult life.) I knew that he had lost some weight, but chalked it up to his increasing age, not to mention the healthier food we were feeding him and the additional exercise he was getting by being able to go outside. But this amount of weight loss was concerning.) The vet was also concerned, and recommended that we run some bloodwork to see if anything was amiss. Meanwhile we were sent home with meds for his eye and advised to try and re-fatten him with more wet food. The bloodwork came back fine, with a "slightly elevated liver enzyme" as the only thing out of the ordinary, and the vet was not concerned about that. We were advised to stay the course, his eye infection cleared up, he enjoyed the extra wet food, and things seemed "OK."
This past Friday night, I came home from my concert and found him in extremely bad shape. He was breathing, though very rarely and shallowly, and was completely unresponsive. I scooped him into my arms and Ben drove us to the emergency vet in Berkeley. They immediately wrapped him in a blanket, put a little oxygen mask around his face, inserted an IV and began giving him fluids. We were informed that he was extremely critical, and the decision needed to be made immediately whether to proceed with CPR and a battery of tests to determine the problem, with no guarantee that he could be cured or would even survive the procedures - or we could choose to humanely euthanize him.
I'm sure anyone who's been through it knows that this is a terrible, awful decision to have to make. It's impossible to know what the 'right' answer is. You second-guess yourself constantly. I'm sure, to the doctor and the vet techs, it was painfully obvious that it was his time to go (and one of them took a bit of an attitude with us, as if we were really inconveniencing him with our presence, but that's a story for another time), but to me, who's had this cat nearly fifteen years, this cat who's been my comforter through breakups and illnesses, who sounded like he was saying "mama" when he meowed, well, the path to take was less clear.
In the end, I chose to let him go. Honestly, he was already gone. I held him in my arms until the end, scratching his chin like he always loved, telling him he was my sweet Praline. And then I held him for a while longer, and then we went home. He'll be privately cremated and we'll have his ashes in an urn.
