My cat Izzy, whom I've been taking care of for the last couple months, died suddenly and unexpectedly yesterday morning. She'd been at the vet the previous afternoon, where we found her kidney values had remained fairly stable since her last visit three weeks previous. The vet was having us change up some medications to help keep her more comfortable, and overall, she seemed to be doing better than she had over the weekend. She was fine yesterday morning a little after 6am after I gave her fluids, and at 8:30am Zac found her gasping for breath. He woke me up and I made it in time for her to die in my lap.
I don't think I'll be very productive for the rest of the week.
Next week I'm going to try to return to my old schedule and try to get some things done. After I deleted all of Izzy's feedings, fluids, and other meds reminders from my calendar, I realized how much time I spent taking care of her. I'll have a lot more time now, not to mention a lot more sleep.
Not that I ever second guessed giving up all of that to take care of her.
Izzy was such an integral part of our lives, it's hard to imagine what life will be like without her in it. I brought her home just over 12 years ago; she'd been dumped at the barn with another littermate. After her sibling was stepped on by a horse and had to be put to sleep (I took him to the vet to see if he could be saved), I decided I was not going to watch another kitten die. I trapped Izzy and took her home.
She was a feisty little thing from the very beginning. I don't know if it was "tortitude" (she was a tortie tabby), or the fact that she'd spent three formative weeks of her kittenhood at the barn, but she was a troublemaker. She broke a lot of things that I cared about, chased my old lady kitty, and attacked our feet under the bedsheets until she was a good four years old. She also absolutely adored our other young cat, Ivan, who was three when we brought her home. I nearly lost them both when I separated from my husband in 2014, but ultimately he decided he didn't want the cats (I think he'd been using them to try to make me come back), and I got them back in late 2015, a year and a half after I'd left.
It will always make me sad that Ivan never came around to Izzy after she came back from the hospital. He'd always hissed at her when she came back from the vet, and it would take him days to be willing to snuggle again. She loved him all of her life, and would often sleep with him or go to him for snuggles and grooming, and I know she wanted that so much when she came back from the hospital. The closest they got was about a month ago, when he let her sleep on the couch near him for a little while (she kept inching closer, and was right next to him by the time he got fed up and left), and about a week before she died, when he looked in the bathroom at her (he might have been wanting to steal her food, but it was the closest he'd come to her without hissing in a long time).
I'm glad though that we were able to be with her when she died. She took her last breath in my lap. I am grateful that she died knowing she was home and we were there.
I'm going to take the rest of the week easy. There will be plenty of time to get back to a schedule next week.
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