A personal note

Five minutes ago.

A few days ago, my little cat Zeki went blind. When I realized he couldn’t see, I brought him to the vet. His blood chemistry was catastrophic. His kidneys just aren’t working anymore.

Long-time readers will remember that he was diagnosed with severe renal disease in January. It’s a progressive, incurable, and fatal affliction. Intellectually, I’ve understood that perfectly. But some part of me thought that if I just took care of him well enough—if I gave him his sub-Q fluids every day, and made him take his blood pressure pills and drops, and coaxed him into eating his yucky renal-diet cat food—I could keep him alive forever.

Blind cats, like amputee cats, tend to get on just fine. I’ve seen sightless cats negotiate an apartment so confidently that you’d hardly notice they were blind. But Zeki’s nearly twenty, and he’s always had problems with his vestibular system. It’s too late in the day for him to adapt.

It’s awful to see how frightened and bewildered he is. He’ll walk right into a wall and panic as he realizes all over again that he can’t see anything and he doesn’t know why. He freezes in place and howls until I pick him up. Frightened cats want to run and hide in small, dark places, but he doesn’t know where to run, and now everything is dark.

The blindness isn’t the worst of his problems. Until this week, I thought he was doing reasonably well. His muscles were clearly wasting—he growingly felt as if he were made of fur, bones, and SubQ fluid—but I figured we could go on like this a while longer. I was wrong.

For cats, normal creatinine values are 4-18 mg/L. His is now 99. The normal range for urea is .37-.69 g/L. His is 2.88 g/L. His kidneys are palpably asymmetric and shrunken, the vet said. He’s deep in IRIS Stage IV. With numbers like this, she told me, I should expect days, not weeks.

She offered me the option of putting him on an IV drip and flushing him with fluids again. But when I pressed her, she said that she wasn’t optimistic about him responding.

In the crook of my arm, where he feels safe.

I thought about it overnight. I decided not to do it. It was one thing when it was reasonable to hope that he would recover his vitality. But his body is clearly shutting down now. Uraemic toxins are destroying his organs. He’s haggard, and now that he’s blind, he’s having trouble walking, too. I don’t know whether that’s because he’s so disoriented or because he’s so weak. But either way, it’s a sign of advanced disease. I figured that at best, we’d stave off death for a few more weeks. At worst, he’d die at the clinic, in the middle of the night, alone and terrified.

I couldn’t do that to him. It’s not right to take a sick, elderly, newly-blind cat to the place he hates most and leave him there for days. Not unless you’re reasonably sure it’s in his best interest. Zeki has made it perfectly clear to me what he wants. He wants to be right near me, where he can feel me and hear my voice. So long as he can feel me next to him, he’s not frightened. But he absolutely does not want to be in a cage with a tube in his paw, surrounded by evil-smelling strangers who restrain him and violate him with needles and thermometers.

It’s obvious that he feels acutely helpless. And rightly so, because he is. In the wild, he’d already be someone’s lunch. The smell of other stressed animals— monstrous predators, like dogs, bigger, stronger cats—how could that be anything but terrifying to a blind little thing like him? When the vet drew his blood, he became so frantic and hysterical I could hardly stand to see it. Every bit of him was pleading with me not to leave him there. It was clear that subjecting him to that in the hope of squeezing a few more weeks of life out of him would be cruel.

He’s beside me now. He doesn’t seem to be in pain. He’s surprised me, these past few days, by eating lustily whenever I offer him food. He purrs when I hold him.

But he’s terribly weak, and getting weaker by the hour. I didn’t realize how weak he was until a few minutes ago, when I took him to the litter box. After relieving himself, he lay right down in it, panting, too exhausted to try to figure out where he was and how to get back out. I cleaned him up and carried him back to bed, where he relaxed again.

He’s not vomiting or crying or convulsing. His score on the Feline Grimace Scale is somewhere between 2 and 3. He’s not laboring for breath, except when he’s frightened. He isn’t trying to hide. He just wants to be near me. So I don’t think he’s suffering, even though he’s dying.

But just to be sure, I just gave him a dose of morphine. It made him a little groggy, but not so much that he turned down dinner. (He seems thrilled that I keep offering him chicken Sheba, his favorite meal, instead of the tasteless Renal Chow he’s been eating for the past year.)

I can’t be sure, but I think that if he were able to speak, he would say that he feels warm and safe and that this is how he prefers to spend what remains of his time. I hope so. I hope I’m doing the right thing. Of course, I don’t know.

So the end will come soon. But it isn’t here yet. And so long as he’s right by my side, he’s okay. He’s baffled, but when I caress him, he purrs. And when he’s sleeping, which is all he does now, I’m sure he doesn’t remember he’s blind. He dozed in a sunbeam this morning. Now he’s enjoying his electric heating pad.

He doesn’t have all the symptoms of a cat in acute renal failure. I keep reading that cats in the advanced stage of this disease have acutely bad breath and body odor. His brother Suley has CKD too, in an earlier stage, and it must be said that Suley’s breath is not so nice (although it’s awful in an adorable way). But Zeki doesn’t have bad breath at all. In fact, he’s soft and wonderful-smelling.

And he shouldn’t have an appetite at all, with this much urea in his blood. He should be nauseated and vomiting. But he’s eating with gusto.

He’s been such a good cat. He patiently let me stick a needle in him every day to give him fluids and never made a fuss about it. He hated taking his blood pressure medicine, but after fighting me every single time as if I was trying to kill him, he’d swallow it and instantly forgive me, as if the whole battle had never happened. He held no grudges. He’d purr and cuddle just as soon as the pill went safely down his hatch.

He clearly did think I was an idiot for failing to understand that he did not like that, though. The look he’d give me when I came at him with the pill was one of wonderment at my obtuseness. “Claire! How much clearer can I be?”

I DO NOT LIKE PILLS, CLAIRE, YOU SEE.
NOT IN A HOUSE. NOT IN A BOX.
NOT WITH A MOUSE. NOT WITH A FOX.
I WILL NOT EAT THEM HERE OR THERE.
I DO NOT LIKE THEM ANYWHERE!

I ordered a special stress-relieving pheromone collar for him from Amazon. It just arrived an hour ago. It’s supposed to smell like his mom, whom he never knew. But cat moms emit this pheromone, and stressed cats are said to find it very soothing. I wasn’t sure how he’d take to it—he’s never worn a collar—but I think he likes it, actually. He doesn’t seem stressed. I think he’s enjoying his morphine, too. I hope so.

Anyway, this has been distracting me to the point I’ve got nothing done these past few days. I’ve tried, but I just haven’t been able to concentrate. It’s not good for me to do nothing, though. I need to get back to my usual work routine, and not just because my readers expect it, but because it’s the best thing for me, too.

The other cats know perfectly well what’s happening. They aren’t even whining and trying to steal his food when I feed him. Even though it’s Chicken Sheba.

They understand.

Life can be so unbearably sad.