Angus

It has been a bad winter for pets.

Angus the little orange cat passed away yesterday. He’d been dropping weight faster than I liked, which we thought was a dental problem, but a week ago he started stumbling. It rapidly became clear that he had terrible vertigo, he began falling even with sitting, and his pupils were different sizes, which is a pretty clear sign of neurological problems. Our options were down to spending an exorbitant amount of money on CAT scans just to confirm what the vet was already sure of–tumor on the inner ear, clearly growing very fast.

There’s very little treatment at that point. Even if we could spend an insane sum on brain surgery on a senior cat, even if it was miraculously successful, the inner ear was already damaged and he would spend the rest of his life thinking he was falling over. Since I would not wish my worst enemy to die of vertigo, we put him to sleep yesterday afternoon.

It was a shockingly fast decline and I’m still rather stunned. He was the sweetest little cat in the world, he wanted nothing more than to be on the bed, preferably tucked up against a human. He liked to sleep with his head on other cats’ butts, to their general dismay.

I know this is the price of admission for having pets, and I never doubt that I will do it again and again and again, but god, we only lost Brandon last month. Twice in a row like this is hard. We are as skilled as people can be in making these choices, but I’d really like to not exercise that skill for awhile.

Well. Ben (or at least, Ben’s butt) was the great love of Angus’s life, and I hope they are together again in whatever afterlife awaits cats. And no one else in the house is allowed to die until 2016 at the earliest.

6 thoughts on “Angus

  1. Jes says:

    Oh no…that’s so sad. I have a really impaired sense of time; seems like you just brought Angus home a little bit ago. It’s not much comfort, but at least he went quickly, no long wasting away. And you gave him a great home.

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