I never really felt like it would ever come to this, but I need to publish a retraction. In my last (rather glib, I might add) post, I cavalierly scoffed at Sean’s insistence that Mango’s purring was alarming, and that we should be paying attention to it. If I’m honest, a lot of that was based on an accumulated sense of helplessness with her.
Mango really has two speeds–doing fine, or red-alert emergency–mostly because we aren’t allowed close enough to her to see how she’s doing on a day-to-day basis. Since the purring incident, Mango had a bout with constipation, then diarrhea, then some vomiting, then some sniffling, but none of it quite red-alert enough, or consistent enough, to send us to the vet’s office. It’s been cold, so despite her little warmth-fort, I hadn’t seen a lot of her lately. Sean usually does most of the Mango-care, but yesterday he went out of town to visit family for the holiday, so today was really the first day I’ve seen her for a sustained period of time in the daylight.
And I didn’t like what I saw. Not at all.
Mango was emaciated. She had been losing weight, sure. But today, it was like I could see her bones. And when she went to the water bowl for a sip, she stumbled a bit going back to her bed. So, I grabbed a towel and threw it over her, and off to the vet we went. It was the easiest time I’ve ever had catching her.
We didn’t have an appointment, so we waited a while. And it was interesting, because everybody who came in and looked in her carrier commented on what a pretty girl she was. There was something about that that made my words catch in my throat when I told them thank you. I don’t recall anybody ever using those words in association with Mango before, except for Sean and me.
And when we finally got in to see our new vet (who’s awesome, by the way), she pretty much confirmed my worst fears. Mango was not just sick, she was very very sick. She was pretty severely dehydrated, and she’d lost four pounds since June. At six pounds now, that meant she’d lost almost half her body weight. She had left us a “scaredy scat” of both urine and feces, as per usual, and examination of the urine proved that it was very high in bilirubin, struvite crystals, and a bunch of “atypical,” rapidly-splitting cells. She was also severely jaundiced, all of which pointed to either liver cancer, bladder cancer, lymphoma, or some metastasized combination of the three. We could do some more tests to be sure, but the bottom line was that a.) she was in pain, determined by palpating her liver, b.) nothing she currently has was going to go away on its own, and c.) anything she had would mean us giving her meds and/or injections and/or force-feeding her food for the rest of her natural life. Mango’s life was not exactly bluebirds and butterflies as it was, but aggressively treating any kind of cancer would make it a living hell for her.
Sean wasn’t with me, so I called him to talk it over, as best as I could between my sobs. But the choice seemed pretty clear to me. Here was a cat whose last few years of life had been a meager existence at best, who was in pain, and who couldn’t stand us and would likely hate having the additional contact that aggressively treating her condition would require.
I tried to pet her a few times while she was on the examining table, but she only hissed at me and jumped to the ground, landing in a jumble of wasted limbs in the floor before she regained her balance and shuffled away. This is what the rest of her life will be like if we don’t do this, I thought. We decided to let her go.
Our vet does a procedure where she basically sedates her to the point of anesthetizing her, then brings her in the room if you want to be with her when she passes. I did, although in Mango’s case, I honestly don’t know what kind of comfort that brought, if any. When the tech brought her back to the room, her eyes stared glassily ahead, no light in them anymore at all. She was still breathing though, one or two breaths, then nothing for a minute or so, then rapid breathing again for about fifteen seconds.
The vet came in a few minutes later and administered the medicine that would end her life, and as I stood there scratching Mango’s head and stroking her fur, tears flowing unabated down my face, I was struck with how sorry I felt. I was sorry I hadn’t noticed earlier how sick she had become. I was sorry that we had never made any inroads into making her a more integral part of our family. I was sorry we never hired a pet psychic as a last-ditch attempt to peek inside her addled mind.
And I was mostly sorry that, on this day after Christmas, I was saying goodbye to a cat who, for better or worse, had been a part of my life for the better part of fourteen years. I was surprised at how hard it was to let her go, because by doing so, I was letting go of that hopeful part of me who believed that someday, she would walk up to us and say hello the way Elroy did back in 2006. She would realize that we just wanted to be her friends, and she would snuggle up to us and purr.
I used to have dreams at night about that, and I would wake up and feel immeasurably sad that the dream was not true. Sean just dreamed that recently, too. Now, it will never be a reality, and that makes me sadder than I ever thought possible.
I don’t know where you fall on the belief scale, and I hope I won’t be offending any of you by saying this, but I really hope Spirit Mango “gets” it better than Corporeal Mango ever did. I hope she stays with us, and joins the buddies in play, and treats, and mush. I hope she realizes that we weren’t scary people after all, and that she sees our tears as we mourn her life, and realizes how much she was loved.
Because she was loved. I joked about her a lot, but most of that was to hide my pain about not being able to get through to her. The truth was, I loved her a lot. Love her a lot. Because she’ll always be part of our family. She’ll always and forever be part of the Buddies Eclectic.
I don’t have a digital picture to show you, but Mango really was a pretty girl. And even though I know that I did right by her today, I already miss her.