It's Daisy Day

It's been a year since we decided to put our Daisy kitty down. I have to admit, sometimes I still feel guilty about making the call to euthanize her. I had watched so many youtube videos on "when is the right time?" or "Did I do this too soon?" trying to decide what to do and when.

They say it is one of the hardest decisions you will ever have to make. They aren't kidding when they say that. With cats, I can say it's even harder. Daisy had cancer. It started as a lump under her armpit that we excised without running a pathology on it. As the lump was growing, I knew it was bad news though because it was hard, red, and oozing in 3 different spots. Without running a pathology on it we couldn't be sure, but it certainly acted like cancer. When it grew back, we did an x-ray and that confirmed it had spread to her lungs.

The lungs are the absolute worst place for growths like this. So many bad things could go wrong so quickly without us being there or having time to help. She could end up SOB, or not breathing at all. I was scared. And cats are notorious for hiding their pain and discomfort. Neither one of us really knew how much pain she was in, and that was the hardest part.

We were already giving her gabapentin for her arthritic pain. She was throwing up nearly every day so we were giving her anti-nausea medication. She basically stopped eating, so we were giving her an appetite stimulant. She was still grooming. Still able to use her litter box. But when we looked at her and watched her, we knew things were bad and getting worse. The hospice vet had given her a ketamine shot, which felt like a miracle drug. It made Daisy do a complete 180. She was like a new cat. She was hungry, she was eating. It was amazing. But it only lasted a couple of weeks. It just seemed to show how much she was actually suffering.

The choice to (and when to) euthanize is a personal decision linked to each experience. We both knew she didn't have much time left, but we didn't know when the right time would be. I expressed my worst fear of both of us being gone at work when Daisy suddenly can't breathe and needs help, and we come home to find her gone and that she had suffered alone without her humans. Or maybe it happens when we're there, but we have to rush her to the emergency vet. Maybe they put her on a ventilator but basically tell us that we need to put her down, and now she's in a scary place and we're doing this so quickly without us being prepared. I couldn't live with either one of those scenarios. 

Of course it still felt wrong to make this decision at all. With dogs, a lot of the time you can see the light go out of their eyes. Maybe they become less active. Maybe they hoble or whimper. Maybe they won't play anymore. Dogs are so expressive. Cats feel like trying to decipher hieroglyphs. And Daisy was never my cat... I took care of her, but Patrick knew her for I think 10-12 of her 18 years. I was barely a blip for her lifespan.

I didn't want to wait until it was "too late". I watched videos of cats with kidney disease.... just wasting away. Losing weight, not eating, sleeping all day, no grooming or playing. I didn't want that for Daisy. We knew she was in pain, but she was a tough girl and it was hard to know how much. I still feel guilt about thinking it was too soon. It's been a year and I don't think that feeling will ever go away. There's always going to be that "what if we had waited?" Sometimes you have to remember quality over quantity. And were we waiting for her, or for us? That's the hardest question to answer. I didn't want to avoid putting her down because of our selfish want for her to be here longer. No matter how you faced it, it was hard to justify either decision.

In the end, we knew she had lived a long, fruitful life. We took care of her the best as we could. We gave her all the pets and all the love. We euthanized her in her home, with her humans and her favorite things. And the worry about her dying alone evaporated because she had gone the best way we knew how. All the suffering she had endured was over. All that is left is her ashes, her pictures, and our fond memories. And that will have to be enough.