Last Wednesday I had to put my cat Shocky to sleep. Shocky was a 13 year old female calico, mostly white with tan and black spotting across her face and body. About 3 weeks ago I noticed that she was acting more high-strung than usual and this is the cat that defines high-strung; living with her was akin to sharing quarters with a sugar-hyped teen. So she seemed a bit more antic than normal and was rubbing her face and talking about it. I looked more closely and noticed that her face seemed swollen and her lower lip discolored, it had turned almost a purplish hue. Having had other older cats that experienced impacted teeth this seemed to be a natural conclusion, so I thought. I took her to the vet as soon as I could.
However the vet had other ideas. He felt along the right mandible of her lower jaw and noticed a lump; he saw a swelling on the right side of her mouth, on the inside. His thinking was that this might be a cancer. Uh oh. This is quite a bit different from a impacted tooth and has all kinds of other consequences and brings up a whole host of other thoughts, immediately, including mortality and death. We agreed to have her come back in a couple days to get a biopsy and x-rays to see exactly what was going on.
Shocky had only come to live with me last August when her former owner/parents moved to Fiji to take a job. Not wanting to have their 3 cats go thru a 2 month quarantine upon arrival they sadly decided they had to give up the cats, at which point I stepped in and assumed ownership.
Shocky was a big girl, weighing about 10lbs but carried it well across a large frame. She was solidly built and moved like a graceful linebacker. She could be intimidating if she wanted and spent a goodly amount of time with a frown on her face, as if contemplating murder most foul. Coupled that with a personality that goes from good mood to downright spitting mad in no time, she could be positively bi-polar, if not possessed by Satan. However I think that most of this schizo type behavior could be explained that I was a new entity to her and she needed to learn me as much as I needed to learn her. Then there was the matter of her praying. When in a good mood, and truthfully, this was most of the time, she would sit on her hind legs, lift her front paws up, and wave them at me to get my attention. Her former owner/Mom explained it to me as "Shocky pray prays". Simple as that, heartbreakingly adorable and stunningly hysterical. Imagine this behavior going on all day, every day; I wake up in the morning, stumble into the bathroom, face the mirror, Shocky runs in, jumps on the back of the toilet and proceeds to pray pray; I sit down to enjoy some Netflix, Shocky jumps on the arm of the chair and pray prays; I sit at the computer, working or writing, Shockie sits on the other desk, to my right and pray prays.
In any case on the agreed upon day I dropped Shockie off at the vet, 8:30am. They called me about noon to come and pick her up. At the same time I was able to view the xrays they had taken of her mouth. It was not pretty; in fact it was downright appalling: her lower right mandible was missing a piece of bone about the size of the end of my index finger. Which is not an inconsequential amount for a cat. In other words the cancer was eating away the bone. The vet and I discussed options, all of which amounted to just being able to make the rest of her life as comfortable as possible, because essentially this was a death sentence. I didn't need to hear the results of the biopsy to know that her life expectancy had dropped dramatically. So I was sent home with a round of antibiotics and liquid pain meds, and Shockie came home with a permanent grimace, as she had to have 3 teeth extracted, and the right side of her mouth was swollen. She also picked up a new name, "Cancer Face".
Why do we let these cats turn us upside down in this way? Why have we, as the dominant species on this planet, open our homes and hearts to this other, more primitive animal? What base instinct are we feeding by allowing cats to live with us? For the most part they are aloof, sleep 20 out of 24 hours, sulky, and lay down some stinky shit. I cannot answer any of these questions, and I have been around cats my whole life as I was raised in a family that had cats, dogs, guinea pigs, ducks, chickens, horses, birds, and fish as pets. Cats shed, covering houses and clothes with a fine patina of fur, they puke almost constantly. But I've also learned alot about cats, not so much anatomy or physiology, but behavior; I've learned to watch the pace of their tail movement to judge mood; I've learned to let them come to me when I am meeting a new cat, let them come to me and sniff my fingers, if they rub my fingers I can then pick them up; and they communicate alot with their eyes. Cats will spend alot of time watching you and following you with their eyes, the more they watch you the more they like you. If you wish to punish your cat, ignore it, this will drive the cat mad with anticipation and worry. Shocky was no different in any of this regard, the more she got to know me the more she looked at me, and the more she prayed at me.
And so, a few days after the x-rays and teeth extraction I got the phone call from the vet with the biopsy results. It was not anything that I hadn't expected: aggressive sarcoma cancer of the mucosa membranes. It was expected to spread quickly and the vet admitted that if cost were no object the best treatments would only give us, on average, another 240 days of life. The feeling that comes over is helplessness, coupled with an abiding sadness. We call these animals into our lives, give up food, shelter and affection, asking back their engagement and love, if love can be returned by cats. But they are also stoic, they are unable to tell us when they are in pain, or if they suspect an illness; in fact they will instinctively hide pain and disease so as to not alert any potential predators of their weaknesses. So there was no telling how long Shocky was in pain, or if indeed she was in pain at this moment; what became distressingly obvious was her rapid decline.
In the days following the teeth extraction Shocky stopped eating and drinking water. She would spend most of her time either under the bed, or at the bottom of the closet. The one day I let all the cats out on the deck to enjoy the sunny warm day, it was....shocking....as to how wasted she was becoming, her fur was lank and bedraggled, the skin was hanging off her, her eyes sunk deeply in her head. Her right lip was starting to bulge out and some kind of infection was spreading on it. Returning to the vet last Wednesday for a scheduled follow-up felt like carrying out a death sentence. After talking it over and showing me the inside of her mouth, bulging and turning blue on the right side, tongue and gum, the vet and I agreed that it was for the best that it was time for her life to end. A sedative was administered, to relax and slacken the muscles; after a couple of minutes a overdose of anesthesia was administered to Shocky, putting her into a permanent sleep. She will be cremated and her ashes spread on a garden in back of the clinic. Up until she lost control of her muscles and was unable to continue, as the sedative took effect, right up to the end, Shocky was purring. I came home and got drunk.
Shocky Prays
