And as I typed them I felt a loneliness, a wispy distant sadness that was at the same time very close, two ends of it arcing over the decade between. My fingers had a memory of that coldness in them, and it's as if I'd just now finished typing the rest. Here's what I wrote on January 2nd, 1997:
RIP for my cat Charles, who died December 31, 1996 at 7:45 a.m. CST.
He suffered a total kidney failure...I brought him into emergency and they
put him on a saline/glucose iv....
The next morning he went into sugar shock when they took him off the
iv...he convulsed and they gave him valium to stop the seizure...
He never woke up. I had him put to sleep about 20 minutes later when his
breathing began stopping for 7-10 seconds at a time...
I loved that cat. He was everything to me.
If I had gotten him to a vet when I discovered some minor symptoms of his
bad kidneys (I didnt know they were bad then), he may have been able to
live. I wondered about his symptoms, but they didnt seem severe at all.
I changed his food and his litter and most of them went away.
Then all of a sudden, it happened. I had masked the symptoms but not the
underlying condition.
Please, if you have any doubts about the health of your cat, no matter how
insignificant its symptoms may be, PLEASE take them to a vet. It may very
well be nothing, or you may be preventing the onset of an acute condition
which could possibly be very serious.
I wish I had done it.
-----yttrx
And here's what some nice person wrote in response:
My sympathies for you in the loss of Charles. Soon the happy memories
of your life together will be what you remember. You have already, with
your warning, done something to ease the pain of your last times your
friend.
And I find now that I really don't have any memories of Charles, except his death, and the mean thing that someone said to me about it. That person is gone now, and I'm the only one alive who knows what she said. How funny and horrible to only remember that.
