Thanks For Your Support W/my Max Options

[catlover2]

Hi all,
thanks for all the support on the loss of my beloved kitty Max. He lived a short (8 yrs) and that is what makes it hard. Did I do enough to save him? He got sick really fast and crashed hard..he was diabetic (but misdiagnosed up until a couple of weeks ago) but we couldn't regulate him and I could see him failing fast. He was getting worse by the hour. I knew I had to end his suffering and not wait until I found him dead inside the house or in a diabetic-induced coma. He lived a "larger than life" type of life...he was the best outdoor kitty. He would be in everynight w/me and has been my buddy for the last 8 years. He was here before my husband or kids! I never expected our 15+ year old cat (Sam) to outlive our other pets. Sam was my husband's cat when we got married but he is my baby too but never has or will take the place of Max. We lost our beloved lab who was barely 9 or 10 a few years ago. It is so hard...I can honestly say that I miss our dog everyday still and I miss Max terribly. I know it will get easier but the guilt kills me. I keep questioning should I have tried more options? Should I have given it more time? But, I made the best decision for him...I couldn't let him suffer any more than he already had..he had been in/out of the vet and his poor arms/legs were a pincushion. He was so badly dehydrated and lethargic, so in that respect taking him to be put down was a bit of a relief. I knew he no longer was in pain and I wasn't worried sick about him anymore. Still, no matter what losing a beloved pet is the worst. Nobody else gets it..... it was an emotional ordeal and I'm still trying to recover.
thanks again for the support, it really does make a difference! I had been on a feline diabetic website (www.yourdiabeticcat.com) to get help for Max and they were all great too, good info and lots of wonderful help/advice to get cats better. But, you know your cat the best and know when to say when. He couldn't go on the way things were (he also was believed to have pancreatic cancer)...so I know I did the right thing. Just so hard when you sign those papers to put down your animal. Yuck-
Thanks again, rest in peace to my Max and all the other beloved pets out there who I know we will see again. :)
Cheri

[toonie]

I am sorry for all that you are going through at this time, I know how much your intentions were in the right place, I know you did what you thought best and no one can judge you, no one should either.
I am also worried about you because you did not come back and I know that when we have been through so much we can be in a very fragile state.
I don't think you were thinking of yourself, I know you also talked with several vets before deciding. I think you had said they also suspected pancreatic cancer, this is often a cause of FD. Cancer interferes with insulin and without the insulin you have death by starvation. I know that professional people would have advised you on that very hard decision. This is a very difficult illness, some do make it through but the average survival is only one to two years. Usually the cats who are diabetic and survive beyond 1 or 2 years are diagnosed diabetic at a much younger age and have as such a better chance of making it, also there is less of a chance that cancer or other health problems ar at the origin of this difficult disease. There is a difference also depending on how soon the FD is diagnosed. When a cat crashes (as opposed to being diagnosed by a routine lab test) the outcome is usually worse. Regulating cats (as opposed to dogs or humans)can be very difficult. A few months ago, someone on a French diabetic forum had an eight year old cat who became diabetic, was quickly regulated but then he went into severe kidney failure and had to be pts...Kidney failure is often a result of FD and insulin treatments. Diabetes can make animals and humans more prone to all kinds of infections and their heart ,liver and kidneys are affected even with insulin. Even though some people were taking care of your cat, one day it would have had to be out of hospital, then what...can one just write an emotional blank check and hand that cat over to a complete stanger then? Not me, I would find that to be totally irresponsible and contrary to the pact I made with my cat that I would always take care of him, best as I could. Someone once wrote in a forum ''I had a diabetic cat who died about 10 years ago. If another pet of mine ever develops this disease, I will take it to the vet for euthanasia as soon as it's quality of life suffers. Unless things have greatly changed since my experience, the constant vet visits trying to stabilize the blood sugar and the many complications of diabetes are too cruel. There is no cure, only fast or slow deterioration, and I am convinced that I tortured that cat trying to prolong it's life, albeit with the best intentions in the world. I now believe that euthanasia would be a kindness".
I know that like you, I would have never accepted to abandon my cat to a hospital(what would he have thought of me then )Was it selfishness that you could not endure the torture of allowing your own soulmate to be left there, afraid, in a cage, unable to sleep or relax through the whines and howls of the other strange suffering animals there, lame, ill, poked for glucose curves etc... I know like you I was afraid to put him through all of these things and would have been dangerously despondent from guilt, had he died in a strange place with strange people thinking I had abandonned him because he was sick.
One of my vets had a cat, only 7 years old, who got a tumor in her nose, the vet
took her 150 miles away to be treated for a month of radiation, then her cat came back and died about a month later, she herself told me that this made her feel very guilty because when she took her cat, she was still hunting in her garden, when she came back she just lay and died, as such her hunting was curtailed by medical interventions that didn't help her at all. WE have at our disposal an impressive amount of choice, the answers to these choices are ours and ours only, how dare anyone call a decision selfish when one hasn't been there to see, to evaluate, to sense and to feel. The thing is we never can know if the decision was best, but only we have the choice and chose we must, we try and chose where our heart is, that should be respected
as much as we respect others for agreeing to 'inflict' any kind of treatment on their pets. We have to respect their choices even though we ourselves could never want our animals to suffer like that.

I do think that in my case, I erred in putting him to sleep. I thought he was despondent, I thought he was so sick he didn't want to go on, during the last hour I realized he was greatly disappointed that I had chosen to end his life. I admit it was a mistake, but with the best intentions, made out of love. And I still wonder if the other options could have turned out to be just as bad if not worse. If anyone wants to berate me for my decision with Yukon, I'm fair game, I have put so much reflection into this, each minute of life has been assimilating this for the last 16 moths now, I am strong and able to put up with this at this time, but if you had done this only weeks after I put my Yukon to sleep I might not have survived this, no kidding.