Sometimes there just aren’t adequate words for some events we go through, and losing a beloved pet is one of those.
The wound is terribly raw and fresh; having lost Jerry just
on the 18th. I’m not going to elaborate in detail here as we really
don’t know what exactly happened. Overall, I guess we can chalk it up to the
perils of him being an outside cat during the day; one who lived to hunt and
ate most of his kills and may have ingested something bad. We had gotten back
from the Northwoods days before and he was very happy to be back on our
property where the hunting was much better.
One day he came in early and started laying around. He has in the past caught and eaten too many creatures at once, so we figured he had just overeaten. That stretched into the next day, when he didn’t want to go out and he started refusing his normal food. By the third day I was worried about a possible blockage of some sort, so I spent most of the day in Appleton at an ER vet hospital. The creature showed up on x-ray in his colon so seemed to be digesting ok but he showed a possible urine blockage as his bladder was huge.
Since the ER hospital was charging a pretty penny, I got Jerry into the animal shelter vet who works in Waupaca part time by the next day. Because of our long history of volunteer work with them, we get a real price break on the vet bills. Jerry was indeed blocked so he had surgery and bloodwork.
From that point forward it was almost a daily occurrence for
us to transport him down there for subcutaneous fluid injection as he wasn’t
eating or drinking much. Bloodwork was again checked and showed no improvement.
The vet had to be absent nearly a week to attend an out of state family
emergency and when he returned on the 17th we repeated bloodwork. That
showed Jerry was in full kidney failure so there was no hope.
A blessing of small-town vets is that some of them still make house calls. Jerry was a timid boy who hated riding in the car and he grew to cower every morning when I’d pick him up knowing he was going back to the clinic for more needle pokes. We couldn’t stand the thought of his last moments being under such stress, in such a scary environment, so we made arrangements for the vet to come to our home that Friday evening.
Jerry had a good last day. We had been putting his leash on
and then following him around as he hunted for up to an hour or two since this seemed
to give him some happy time. Our weather has been beautiful this October, so
thankfully, the days were warm and filled with sunshine instead of being rainy
and gloomy which would have confined him indoors. Sometimes it was hard to imagine he was so sick and dying.
After his final walk with Marc, he came up onto my lap and snuggled next to my neck on my shoulder where I was able to get my final precious hour with him. And that’s where he remained as the vet did the two injections necessary.
Earlier in the day Marc had dug a grave in the front flowerbed where Jerry liked to hang out, and it was such a beautiful evening, I moved with Jerry curled up in my arms looking like he was napping, out into a chair on the front porch. I sat and stroked him and told him what a good boy he was and how much he was loved until I figured he had had time to grow his angel wings and head up into the darkening evening sky for the Rainbow Bridge. We wrapped him in towels, placed him in a box, in the hole in the ground, I threw the last dahlia of the season on top and Marc shoveled the hole closed. Getting past missing him is the hardest part and I’m nowhere near that yet. I've never had such a loving cat.
Godspeed, my sweetest ever boy.
