Midnight Mutterings | Kitty death with dignity

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

My son and I spent Christmas 2018 in my cabin at Obstruction Pass in the company of Sybil-the-Cat. During the holiday she developed a serious swelling under her chin, which pulled her lip down and exposed her lower teeth. The swelling gave her an impressive snarl, reflecting one of her personalities. (Another of her personalities was expressed by the permanent smile that most cats have when viewed from the side.) Otherwise, STC seemed fine in spite of her multiple personality disorder.

A couple of days after Christmas, the swelling drained clear fluid, making her chest quite wet and changing her snarl back into an ordinary kitty smile. No vet was
available on Orcas, so I took her to Bellingham to Fairhaven Veterinary Hospital, where my daughter’s cat Kasi had received a decade of exemplary care from Dr.
Wendy.

Dr. Wendy wasn’t available that day so Sybil-the-Cat received good care from some other nice vet. He couldn’t diagnose Sybil’s problem in spite of an expensive x-ray, nor could he confirm my suggestion that she might have had a blocked salivary gland. In any case the swelling did not return and all went well until mid-February.

Sybil-the-Cat and I were visiting in Bellingham when I noticed a small white something beside her right ear. It was the size and shape of a half a pencil eraser. It
was dry, apparently not painful, or itchy or anything. It was just there, where it hadn’t been before.

So back to Fairhaven Vet, and this time Dr. Wendy was IN. She didn’t know what the growth was but did a biopsy, and we got the results the next day, which I think was a Thursday: Mast Cell Carcinoma.

On Friday, when I woke, Sybil-the-Cat’s hind legs were paralyzed, but she could pull herself around on the rug by her front claws. Otherwise, she seemed her normal self. As when her normal self was a friendly, purring kitty, not her Mr. Hyde optional personality. So off to Dr. Wendy again, who was, as always, limited to one personality: kind, caring, and very smart. She said cats sometimes have a temporary paralysis, and as Sybil-the-Cat didn’t seem to be in any particular distress, why not see how things were in the morning.

On Saturday morning, Sybil the cat had progressed to quadriplegic, though she was still in a good mood, could eat, drink and purr. So we showed up at the Veterinary Hospital as soon as it opened. Sybil-the-Cat and I spent the morning there. Dr. Wendy and I sat on the heated floor, in a room that didn’t seem like an exam room, given the curtains and floor pillows.

We took turns holding Sybil-the-Cat in our laps. STC was covered with warm, pheromone-infused towels. Cat-appropriate music drifted softly from a speaker in
the ceiling. Eventually, a tech arrived and put in an IV, and Dr. Wendy and I talked about Atul Gawande’s book On Being Mortal, which I had heard of but hadn’t had the nerve to read, in spite of being a big Gawande fan. Dr. Wendy said she changed her practice dramatically post-Gawnde. We talked about my daughter and her cat Kasi, and some other animals and people we knew in common. Someone brought in something for us to drink and some snacks.

At one point, I asked Dr. Wendy if she needed to be somewhere other than sitting on the warm floor with a cat in her lap. She just smiled and said she was co-owner of the hospital and this was where she needed to be at this particular time.

Eventually the day wore on and a tech came in and switched Sybil-the–Cat’s IV bag to one containing something more permanent. A few minutes later Sybil sighed and died in my lap. We sat a while longer until I was ready to leave and after someone else had come in and talked to me about cremation options, costs, etc., and we made a plan. We don’t know if STC was paralyzed by other Mast Cell Tumors, perhaps abdominal, maybe neurological… I didn’t see the point in autopsy except for
satisfying intellectual curiosity.

That was, of course, Sybil-the-Cat’s last day at age approximately 16. It was not my first day of thinking seriously about options for dying — cat and human. Given what I have heard about human deaths and what I have personally witnessed in hospitals: vents, tubes running in and out of where no tubes should be, banks of monitors blinking and pinging, about pain that can’t be totally controlled, about fear, about choices not made in time, I can’t help doubting it’s the only, or even a good option.

Sybil-the-Cat’s last day was the day I decided that when my time comes, if I get a choice, I’m going to the vet. I’m voting for the warm, pheromone infused towels that smell like lavender, soft, cat-appropriate music coming out of the ceiling, and the kind voice of Dr. Wendy talking about Atul Gawande.