Kipper's Story

swe200608200003
Originally uploaded by pcgxk.

This is not exactly a pleasant story to say the least, but I kinda feel the need to write it all down.

At about 6pm on Saturday, I was sitting in the computer room laying out loads of paper on the floor, preparing to do my swedish tax return for the first time. Kipper strolled into the room in his normal fashion and sat down on the papers like any good cat should. I pulled them from under him and had a chat with him like you do with your cats and then noticed that he was making a really funny sounds from his throat and that he was breathing really heavily, but with his mouth open. He sounded like he was in real difficultly. I looked it up in the ever reliable "catopedia" and it didn't sound good. Removal to vets immediately seemed to be the overall summary. I spoke to sarah downstairs and came back up 5 minutes later. He still looked the same, but then as we came into the room he coughed up some blood. Definately time to go to the vets.

I put him in the cat box, left Sarah at home and headed for the emergency room of the Djursjukhus (Animal Hospital) which is about 20 minutes drive away. He sounded the same in the car all the way, very gravelly breathing.

When I arrived they did a quick interview at reception and then I saw a vet about 30 minutes later. I spoke some fairly bad swedish to her, but I'd looked up most of the key words before leaving home (breathing, coughing etc). She looked at me and spoke some english and said along the lines of "Are you prepared that this is probably not a good diagnosis". Unfortunatley I already was.

She checked him out and then we took him for some xrays. He'd coughed up more blood by this time and was having a harder and harder time breathing. Giving a non sedated cat an xray is not exactly an easy or pleasant thing to do, but I put on my lead apron and held him down so we could get it done immediately. I was getting increasingly emotional down as I had a real bad feeling about what was coming.

We finished the xrays and I took him back to the little vets room we were assigned to. Then it all kicked off. He was starting to make some really bad noises and look really distressed and he was rolling around from side to side. I was trying to calm him but it wasn't going to happen. The he shit himself and started to cough up loads of blood. He got out of my grasp and ran to the corner of the room and started rolling around there. Then he pissed on the floor as well and I ran to get the vet. They sent a nurse in to clean him up whilst I spoke to the vet, we were looking at the xrays and she explaining to me that he had loads of fluid in the chest and all sorts of other unexplained things, such an enlarged heart and that it was basically not good at all.

All this had happened in about 2 minutes and we'd swiched to some english at this point to talk about medical stuff. Then we heard some anguished screams from both nurse and cat and I said to the vet "Are you trying to tell me that you have to put him down, but you're breaking it to me slowly?" and she confirmed what I already really knew. I said to her that we should just do it straight away because he was by this time obviously in so much distress and he just seemed to be dying there and then anyway as his body gave up completely, but he was doing it in a shed load of pain. So we rushed back to the room where he was and there was a bad bad scene of blood and bodily fluids everywhere. We grabbed him and it took all 3 of us to hold him down, as he was fighting so much for air at this point, and 30 seconds later it was over, relief to all, but especially to kipper.

It goes without saying that by this time I was more than a little upset and they left me alone to cry for a few minutes and decide what to do next. Obviously I needed to tell Sarah, but there was one final twist of the knife before that. In his last throws of distress Kipper had sunk his teeth into my hand quite badly, a double sided bite, which the vet informed me meant I had to go to casulty immediately to get penicillin for as it would definately become infected.

So I had to ring Sarah and tell her all of this, and explain everything, and then we had to go a sit in casulty, which I can assure you was not where I wanted to be right then, until about 3am.

Since then I've been taking the penicillin and sitting at home feeling rather blue. We'll never actually know what caused it, but the most likely thing appears to be some form of cancer or virus that cats get, which just goes un-noticed. He'd been happy and jolly in the weeks and days leading up to this, and we really had no idea. Subsequently I learnt that he had been sitting differently and the fashion that he had been sitting in meant that he was potentially having trouble breathing, but it just goes to show, as beyond that he was just his normal self. Then one night in the space of 3 hours he died.

It's amazing how much you become attached to your pets, and hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it, as some people just say, "well you can buy another one", or "it's only a cat", but suffice to say I don't think of it like that. A pet like a cat or a dog is something that you share your house and your life with on a day to day basis, and of course the thing about any such pet is that they give you unconditional love.

Obviously I'm trying to remember him as pictured above, as this is how it should be. He brought great joy to my life.