Sick Angst

Angst stopped eating and drinking about a week ago, near as we can tell. Last Tuesday, we could audibly hear him taking each breath through a clogged nose. He’s always been a little sneezy and wheezy so we weren’t sure if we should be worried.

He stopped using the litterbox, and he stayed in the corner in the back of Doc’s closet, hiding.

Thursday night we took him to the emergency hospital because we were afraid he wasn’t going to make it. His breathing sounded rattly and sporadic, and he looked so thin.

He weighed 7.8 pounds, which is about 2 pounds less than he weighed a couple of months ago.

They gave him fluids and antibiotics, and said if he didn’t perk up by Saturday, to take him to our vet.

He only seemed to get worse. We went to the store and bought one of each different kind of cat food we could find, cans and pouches and treats and little dried fish and something called, creepily enough, “catmilk.” He wouldn’t touch any of it. Twice we force-fed him spongy canned kitten food with a pastry tube, and he tried to spit as much of it out as he could.

This morning we took him to our veterinarian. He was diagnosed with pneumonia, severe asthma (and having attacks), and the early stages of liver failure. They planned to give him fluids, steroids, antibiotics, and put him in a nebulizing chamber to get medication directly to his lungs. He needs to be hospitalized until at least Monday.

We just got back from visiting him, and he looked a bit more alert. Doc was able to get him to voluntarily eat some canned food. It’s touch and go, very much so; he could have an asthma attack that could prove fatal. But seeing him eat on his own really brightened our spirits.

Doc says (and I agree) that he really has just been trying to do the equivalent of crawling off into the woods to die. He realized that it was his time, so he quit eating and drinking. But we humans are funny creatures, and we meddle with the natural life cycles of our furry companions. Neither of us have any wish to prolong his life past the point where he’s comfortable, past the point where his quality of life is suffering; past the point where it stops seeming right.

I don’t think he’s gone quite that far yet. The next few days will tell us a lot. I am, however, trying to prepare myself for the eventuality of having to let him go. This morning, I thought that it was going to be today. Now I have hope that he will be able to get healthy again, that he’ll be able to be ANGST again for a while.

I think that if we hadn’t taken him to the hospital, he wouldn’t have survived the weekend.