Wank

As the title suggests, it hasn’t been a great week!

First up, I need to explain where I’ve been. You know what? I’ve been inspired to write blogs again and again over the last few weeks but they’ve passed and I’ve failed. There are two reasons for this; one that I was trying to finish the WIP which had reached the edits and alts stage with beta readers doing a sterling job of spotting the many and legion errors I have left in! Thank you beta readers. You are awesome and you know who you are. Two; my cat, has been dying which, it turns out, is quite distracting. And indeed, this week, he has died.

I’m not sure what’s worse really, going to the vet and discovering that your hitherto healthy, but quiet cat, is actually really ill and leaving without him (Chewie) or getting the results of blood tests that show your cat is in the most robust health and then discovering he has an inoperable cancer which will kill him a few short weeks.

Fifty five days, the internet said when I quizzed it for a prognosis. It was pretty spot on, although in our case, my ridiculous, much-loved fur bag lasted forty seven. I resent the loss of that week, but I suppose you can’t win ’em all.

The end came fast. McCat had been losing a lot of hair off his back with great flakes of skurf. I read up on this and discovered most results posted it as benign but with an outside chance it was skin cancer. The advice advised me to check. Well, he had a carcinoma in his mouth which had doubled in size in a week. Of course it was skin cancer. It had metastasised. I ignored it because it didn’t appear to be bothering him and I doubted it would kill him before the other one did. All I cared about was making sure that I sorted him out before it went to his jawbone, as that would cause him great pain.

Come Monday, he was drooling comprehensively and washing his face to mop it away with his front paws. Soon they too were soaked, then his chest, as if he was staunching an eternally leaking pipe with a towel he could never squeeze out. Which he was, I suppose. Tuesday things were better. He was perky. He’s been struggling to eat and we have been trying various different types of food. This being the case, we knew he had a couple of weeks at the outside to live, or possibly days but he was still his usual perky self.

He managed to eat a purina gourmet thing that looked like a big chunk of liver pate. He was very chipper afterwards, striding into the loo and demanding lap time as I sat (that’ll teach me to shut rather than lock the door). He then spent time wandering round the garden sniffing, digging, scratching and generally ferreting about. In other words; doing what he always does before coming back for more lap time, and more cuddles.

But despite such good spirits, his chest was still soaking with drool, although he’d open his mouth to let me put the pain meds in, something he had refused to do on Monday. I’d got them there in the end—which might have been why he was OK on Tuesday, and he’d clearly been glad of them—but it had taken time and a great deal of gentle effort.

Tuesday, I gave him extra pain meds, which seemed to slow up the drool a bit but I was worried. I didn’t want to take him to the vet because I didn’t want to have him put to sleep if he wasn’t ready, or worse traumatise him with a visit to the vet in what was clearly his last week. At the same time, I was worried about the drooling and the fact he was trying so hard to smooth his fur down, grooming it to the point where he was beginning to pull tufts out. That had to hurt. I tried to make a film about him for the vet so I could ring, explain and send it in. The idea being that we could discuss whether he needed to make a last journey that day, or whether he had more time, without my going in there with him first.

He immediately climbed on my lap, meowing cheerfully. I leaned back to try and continue the video and he stood on my chest, kneading vigorously and putting his face close to mine, which we call ‘doing love’. Basically the next move is that I have to stroke his ears and eyes. As I obeyed his command, he purred up the usual storm and I wondered if this would be the last time.

It was.

Harrison being a nutter a few years ago … I love this film.

Wednesday, I woke to find him relatively dry, which was great but when he stood in the basin in the downstairs loo and shouted for me to turn on the tap, the coldness of the water clearly hurt too much for him to be able to drink. He tried but he flinched away and couldn’t. He asked for water several times, with the same result. On the upside, he decimated another gourmet blob from Purina. Except it didn’t make him chipper. He was restless and walking around, grooming his chest and front legs compulsively and refusing to let me administer his pain meds by turning his head away. After three goes I got some into his mouth and he seemed to feel better because he settled into his box in my office, curled up and went to sleep.

I rang the vet’s. They were a vet down and were fully booked until Saturday but offered me a call. After a couple of hours, I rang and asked to book the Saturday appointment, explaining that I really needed the call because Saturday might be too late. I added that I feared any pending consultation might be a one-way trip. They immediately opened up an emergency appointment for McCat that evening. I took it.

At around four, McCat woke up and asked for a meal. I gave him a chicken and rice soup pack that McOther had bought that morning. McCat got tore into it. He couldn’t eat all of it but clearly managed and enjoyed some. Then he went out, sitting on the bench outside my office window, he watched the world go by, alert, pointy eared, his head moving back and forth as he checked out the affairs of his kingdom. But his eyes were still a little narrowed, suggesting pain or dehydration, I wasn’t sure which.

Well no, I was. I knew he was now in pain, but with the amount of dribble soaking his chest and front paws, I worried he might be dehydrated as well. Worse he had been over grooming, trying to smooth and untangle his drool-matted fur and tearing out chunks adding a raw, sore forearm, armpit and chest to the equation too.

Watching him out there, I wondered if he knew it was the end. It felt as if, maybe, he did. He seemed calm, he was still able to play when McOther found a palm leaf and wiggled it about for him. The over grooming had stopped and he looked around him as if he was trying to remember it all, taking it in for the last time. When the moment arrived to box him up, he came in of his own accord.

Boxed and ready, I took him into the vet’s but there’d been another emergency and the receptionist said they were running late. Ten to fifteen minutes they reckoned. They took me to a room where McCat and I could wait on our own. I opened his box but this was the vet’s so clearly he was buggered if he was coming out.

‘I may be drooling as if I’ve had a blow to the head but it doesn’t mean I have, so I’m not stupid. I know this is the vet’s. No thank you.’

Yeh. Couldn’t blame him.

The vet arrived very quickly. A LOT quicker than advertised. It wasn’t one of the ones he’d been seeing about this, but a lovely, gentle soul he’d seen before for his shots at some point. I explained the problem. I showed her where he’d torn the fur out of his chest and the top of his front legs and how red raw it was. I said he was still perky but that he’d had a bad day and that I saw no way to stop him over grooming until he was even more sore, and that, even if I could find a way to keep him dry and make him stop, I doubted he had time to heal anyway. She agreed.

She said if it was her cat … and I agreed. She tried to look in his mouth and he tried to scratch her. I apologised and said he was in pain I thought. She agreed. Luckily he got her sleeves but not her. She took him off for a sedative, because he was scared and they have to put a cannula into them. He looked back at me as she took him through the door. I said it was OK and that I would be here.

When she brought him back they’d wrapped him up in a blanket, he was calm and a bit woozy but as soon as I sat and held him and started stroking his head with my thumb, I felt him relax. He was OK then. Not worried or scared. She put the stuff in and I felt him change from calm to just … not there. She took his pulse and reckoned his heart had stopped before she’d finished administering the dose.

So McCat is gone.

When I go into the utility room, where he slept, to empty the water out of the tumble drier, there’s no-one to come rushing over, making chirping noises, leap onto the sink, landing with a smack like a 12kg semi-frozen turkey thrown from a second floor window, and watch the water going down the drain with extreme, pointy-eared, interest. There’s no-one trying to sit on my lap on the loo, or yelling outside the door because I’ve locked it and he can’t get in.

Nobody is standing in the basin in the downstairs lav, yelling his head off until someone turns on the tap for him to have a drink. There are no ears sticking up over my office window as I come home. Nobody meowing loudly and galloping through the garden alongside me as I come down the path. Nobody is sitting on my keyboard demanding attention as I work or rushing up to the bedroom to wake me by purring in my face of a morning. There is not furry hair bag lying upside down on the sofa beside me as I type this, or since it’s probably a bit past his bed time now, standing on the back of the sofa pulling my hair and grumbling that he wants to go to bed.

It’s weird. And it’s empty.

I had forty seven days to adjust and get ready, but it seems I haven’t. Because even down to that last visit to the vet’s, it appears I was somehow hoping and praying for a miracle. That the almighty would pull something incredible out of the bag. Or that modern science would suddenly be able to fix it, after all.

I’m going to have my knee replaced in two weeks. When they did the other one, McCat absolutely loved it. I had to put my leg up four times a day for twenty minutes with an ice pack on it. I would lie on the sofa, with the offending leg up, draped along the back and McCat would sniff out the sitting target from miles away and materialise at once. He’d then get on board, with a lot of burrping and chirruping and lie purring on my stomach. It’s the only thing about the knee aftermath that I was looking forward to. He would have loved it. I would have loved it. It’s a pisser.

Sleep softly little one. McCat, GNU, RIP.