Good Night Forever, Oliver
You might be wondering why I'm posting about it here on Tumblr when I haven't posted in years. Well, for one, neocities-cli is broken and updating my Neocities without it is currently Hell. For two, I also posted about my previous pets dying here and I might as well have them all in one place.
I got Oliver when he was a kitten. I don't know if I mentioned his backstory when his brother Sebastian died, but basically, we were at my mother's then-boyfriend's house. His dad fed a colony of stray cats and one day, one of the cats got killed by a dog. This cat had two kittens. My mom's then-boyfriend's dad (say that five times fast) took them in, but he was feeding them cow's milk, which resulted in them basically being covered in diarrhea. His eyes were bad, so he couldn't tell. My mother washed them off and we started taking care of them.
I remember keeping them in a box, since we didn't have a pet carrier for them yet. Not even a big box. One day, I think the second day we had them, Oliver pulled his upper half over the rim of the box, threw his head back, and meowed. It was so cute.
When we got back home, the plan was to give them away, but then we got attached. I named Oliver after my British friend, who I have unfortunately lost contact with since. He was gray with a little spot of white on his chest, and one of the sweetest, most loving cats I'd ever met.
I remember one time, I was hanging out in bed with him, and I turned the ceiling fan on. He got up and walked up to it as if it called to him and flopped down underneath it.
Another time, I was laying in bed, minding my own business, when he hopped up on the opposite end of the mattress with something in his mouth. I got in closer to see what it was and realized it was a mouse, and found out it was still alive when Oliver dropped it out of his mouth and started playing with it. I kept screaming in terror. "Kill it Oliver, kill it!" But he just kept playing with it until he eventually got bored and left the room. After he left, the mouse laid there, motionless. I hoped it was dead, so I got closer to make sure, and as soon as I got close, it hopped up and ran under the fucking bed.
I remember when I got a TV in my room for the first time, I put it at the foot of my bed and Oliver would always lay in front of it. I watched a lot of shows and movies with him like this. Then one day last year, I had to rearrange my room, and he stopped coming up with me after that. Instead, he'd come up the stairs, meow angrily at me, and then go back downstairs. I didn't even change that much! Before that, he'd always come up and keep me company. Cats, man.
Oliver had polyps in his ears, basically his whole life. He started getting ear infections. I say infections plural, but at this point, maybe it was one ear infection that kept coming back. The infection affected his balance. He was always a little wobbly, but these often made it worse, at least at the start. I don't know if he got used to it or what, but the infection got pretty nasty at least once, when it was so bad, he hid. The infection was so painful, he thought he was going to die. I didn't want him to keep going through this. The vet suggested surgery to remove his polyps, and I agreed. He was 15, but if we could get a few more years without these infections altogether, I wanted to do it.
Well, the morning of the surgery, I got a call. Oliver was FIV positive. The vet didn't say anything about not being able to do the surgery, so I, foolishly, let them move forward with it. Oliver had started to lose interest in going outside anyway, so hopefully, he could adjust to being an indoor-only cat. But suddenly, the fact that he started getting these infections recently made sense.
After the surgery, Oliver was more wobbly than ever. He stopped eating his dry food, so we started giving him wet food. The thing about Oliver is, at least with the pate and the filet style wet food, he would always just lick the gravy off the top and leave the rest. The only style he would actually eat was the shreds, and that was before this all happened. Well, we got him various wet foods, and all he would do was lick the gravy, even the shreds. The only food he would consistently eat was Churu Chowder, which is basically a soup for cats. I had to pick him up and carry him to the water at times.
So, I took him back to the vet. I was worried they'd tell me to put him down because he wasn't doing well, so I took some pictures.
You can probably tell he doesn't look too healthy. Well, the vet didn't even mention euthanasia. They looked in his ear and said one of his polyps was regrowing (FUCK), but that they'd give him some amoxicillin for home and they also squirted some goop in his ears (I forget what the goop was called). We gave him the amoxicillin, but he still wasn't getting better. They also gave him a steroid for his appetite.
I called the vet and made another appointment a couple weeks later. The morning I called, he had fallen into the basement. This wasn't actually a huge fall, he landed on the stairs, but still, I had to go in and get him out. I saw him meowing pathetically on the wet, muddy basement floor (it gets wet down there when it rains). I couldn't stand to see him like that. I thought the morning of the appointment, I was going to end it right there, so I got a recording of him purring before I went.
After consulting the vet, there were some treatment options. She said there was still an infection, but he was also dehydrated and neurologic, to use the vet's phrasing. I was literally about to have him hospitalized overnight. However, they did a blood test and found that he was, in fact, hydrated, and his organs all looked fine (if he had organ failure, I would have pulled the plug right then). So, they sent him home with a subcutaneous injection of antibiotics, more amoxi drops, and another shot of goop in the ear.
Unfortunately, Oliver didn't really get much better. In fact, he didn't really like to move from his spot on top of the couch. I forgot his steroid one day and he started walking around again. I thought maybe the steroid was having a bad side effect and stopped it, but he was gradually declining. After a few days, I restarted his steroid, but it didn't seem to have an effect. I genuinely don't know if this was a mistake that sounded the final death knell, or if it would have even mattered anyway. All I know is he gradually ate less and less of his Churu Chowder until he stopped altogether. Getting him to drink water was also harder. A couple days ago, I looked in his ear and saw his infection was still there. It survived a serious antibiotic, two rounds of amoxi drops, and two rounds of ear goop, not counting the goop they squirted in after the surgery. What hope did we have of eliminating this thing, especially now that he was in this condition? Throughout all this, he kept going in the basement. Eventually, we found he was going in deliberately and laying in the cold water and mud. He had stopped cleaning himself before the last vet visit. I think he was trying to hide. After this last time when he went in the middle of the night, I took him to my room and slept and hung out with him one last time. I didn't know for sure it would be one last time, but it was. I had to do laundry, so I left him in my room, under my blanket. When I got home from that, I found him on top of the couch, in his usual spot.
I thought I was going to call the vet Monday and tell them it was the end of the line. However, tonight, I was streaming with my friends when my mother called and told me he had died. At least he died upstairs in the warmth, in the arms of my mother, and not in the cold, wet basement. I regret having the surgery, I regret not stopping it when I was told he had FIV, and I regret messing up his steroid, even if I don't know for sure if that last one was what spelled his doom, but I don't regret that. He's not suffering anymore.
Goodbye, Oliver. You were amazing.
