Anyhoo, I wanted to write something about my dear Krusty cat, who we had to put to sleep just two weeks after Sweet Potato. I didn't write about it then, because as my friend B said, "Probably no one would have believed you!" After the outpouring of sympathy we received about SP, it was way too soon.
The marriage between Sweet Potato and Krusty that happened when M and I bought this house had always been a rocky road. Krusty had never been fond of other cats. She tolerated dogs, but always got her hissy cat back up with other cats. So she and SP didn't share even the wide open spaces of this house very well. Krusty always loved being outside in the summertime and over the last year had taken to living outside on a pretty much permanent basis. She wouldn't even come inside to eat.
She tested positive for Feline Leukemia last October and we were advised to keep her inside. At the same time, she'd sustained a puncture wound in her right cheek and because it had become swollen with infection, we had to take her in to have it drained and pick up some antibiotics. While they drained the cheek, they found quite drastic tooth and jaw decay and ended up doing a major extraction.
Poor Krusty. This was our one-eyed, seriously accident-prone, vet-expensive kitty. You might take us to task for letting her roam around outdoors, what with her compromised eyesight and no claws, but she never strayed from the house and was visibly happier to be on her own away from SP. We always took her to the vet after the summer for regular shots and she stayed relatively healthy until the Feline Leukemia diagnosis.
After the cheek and jaw procedures the vet let us know in pretty strongly worded advice that we needed to keep Krusty inside full time. So we tried and we did. I must admit it wasn't quite as difficult as I'd thought it might be (the whining to be let out), and she did ok and kept to herself.
With her immune system weakened she wasn't able to heal completely from the cheek and jaw procedures and after 3 months or so developed another infection in the jaw, just as Sweet Potato was starting to show signs of kidney distress. Krusty had started out able to eat quite well post surgery, and then very abruptly stopped. We dosed her with antibiotics, hoping that we'd caught the infection in time to kill it, but ended up back at the vet right after we put Sweet Potato down.
The jaw wasn't healing at all and Krusty was pretty severely infected. The vet loaded us up with antibiotics, a rinse, pain medication, an appetite stimulant and high-calorie wet food. We followed this regimen for a week and took her back in. She was still losing weight. By this time she was just under 5 pounds. Our only options were invasive and expensive. She would have needed a referral to a animal mouth specialist who would determine whether the jaw was even salvageable. But she was underweight for the procedure. It was risky if we wanted to put her through it, but the vet also said it wouldn't be wrong to consider having her put to sleep, considering the unlikelihood of full recovery.
I knew we would have to put her down. This just had to be the last in a long, long line of drastic interventions she'd been put through since I became her steward seven or eight years ago. M and I both felt like we just couldn't justify the health risk and honestly, the expense any longer. Her quality of life had deteriorated so much in the last six months. The vet gave her the same subcutaneous fluid injection they'd given SP to make her comfortable and hydrate her a bit, and I took her home and told M. The kids were a little shocked. I'd made an appointment for the following afternoon. When we took Sweet Potato in and the vet gave her the initial injection - the anesthetic that lets them go to sleep first - it took a good 15 minutes for her to go to sleep. She laid there on her towel, on her side, just staring at M, who petted her the whole time. It took Krusty about 15 seconds. She collapsed just after the needle went into her leg, she was so underweight. I hadn't cried until that moment, but watching the anesthetic hit her so hard was pretty upsetting.
We didn't announce Krusty's demise to anyone but close family and a couple of friends. I was upset when I stopped to think about it - no sign of cats in the house anymore. No floor-level presence after so long is quite strange. I gathered up all the pet stuff and gave it away to friends and family. And pretty much the day after that, our neighbor cat, Hank started to make himself very much at home.
Which is cool. We still get to use our ridiculous kitty-voices on a daily basis.
Good night sweet kitties.
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