#euthanasia discussion

When we euthanize dogs is it a painless death? When my dog was "put to sleep" blood pooled out of his nose and it broke my heart. He did have a bleeding tumor though and had been throwing up blood. I just want to know he didn't suffer from the drugs they gave him to euthanize him. I'm hoping the blood was just his sinuses releasing what was in them.

Euthasol is just a concentrated anesthetic. We are quite literally putting them to sleep and then into too deep a plane of anesthesia which results in the brain stem turning off. They are unconscious before that point.

A couple things that kind of stand out:

First, will the vet tell you: most likely, yes. But you can also always schedule a quality of life exam if you are starting to get worried.

Second, if the 'kidney problems' were crystals in her urine, then yes a diet will 'fix' that. But if it was chronic renal insufficiency or renal failure, diet doesn't fix that. It can help slow down further damage to the kidneys, but chronic kidney disease is progressive.

Being blind is a bit like being out and night, and just requires some adjustments. As long as he doesn't show signs of distress from bumping into things, and he can find his food and water and nest, this isn't a huge issue. Being deaf can sometimes be beneficial for nervous animals as now there aren't scary bad sounds anymore and if there's no scarybad sounds then there's nothing scarybad so things are great!

Daphne is nearly 14 years old. She's in early kidney failure. She has a huge mass on her right front arm that is likely a fibrosarcoma. She is obese but also has absolutely no muscle mass. In the last 2 days she's stopped interacting, stopped eating, stopped doing anything. Last night we found her hypothermic. Today she can't walk without falling onto her left side. She is vocalizing with a distress meow.

She went downhill very rapidly and it sucks because she is a sweet cat. But she needs to stop being alive.

I'm writing this as I wait for her sedative to kick in.

Euthanasia is far from the hardest part of my job. This is an absolute blessing. And I'm glad that the vets really take my opinions into consideration. They know that I take on plenty of lost cause cases, so if I say "no. Not this one." it really is the end of the line.

I'm glad we're not doing heroics on her. She doesn't deserve the stress when the outcome for her will never be good. She deserves peace.

She is really happy and still likes to go on walks, sometimes bounding around with her tongue lagging. But also her joints are old and sometimes we need to cary her up the stairs or help her get her feet under her.

We love her a billion times over and really don't want her to go out scared and in pain when she hurts herself- and that seems almost inevitable the way she goes down stairs and does other stuff.

Do you have any advice for knowing when its time to let her go? She deserves a good death with peanut butter and love, not scared and in pain

If this was my dog... when I am having to help her get up a significant amount of the time, say 25-30%.

If she can't move when she wants to, that's stressful and scary.

Try to see though if there's areas where she is having more difficulty- is she fine on the carpet but needs help on the hardwood? Are the stairs slick and if so, can something be added to provide traction? And if she's not already, I would definitely ask your vet about pain meds to help the arthritis.

QOL things to watch: decrease in appetite, decrease in degree of desire for social interaction, decrease in desire for things she enjoys, increase in difficulty standing.

A little bg: his usual vet gave him a clean bill of health for years but we switched vets due to the inappropriate ways they handled our other cat. New vet ran blood tests and old boy was in the beginning stages of kidney disease, but he was bright and perky and they said with treatment he could live comfortably for another year or two. Then he suddenly got picky with his food when we put the meds in it, the vet said him not eating was a sign of downward progress and putting him down might be a decision. He was still friendly and spry at this point so I didn't want to believe he was that far along, and the tests didn't show significant worsening. But not even a week later he got really weak, lethargic, and seemed very disoriented. I scheduled an appointment to put him down the next day but he died in my arms that morning 2 hours before his appointment time.

I worry that I caused him more suffering because I didn't want to let go, but I knew this cat for almost a decade and he genuinely didn't seem off at all aside from (what I thought was) associating food with medicine. It still haunts me that he seemed to take such a dramatic turn for the worse.

Thank you for listening.

Cats are just... like that sometimes. They are so extremely excellent at hiding when something is wrong until they can’t and then they go from ‘totes fine, no really!’ to ‘oh gods, yep, I’m dead’ with almost no warning. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if there was something else wrong in addition to the kidney disease that manifested at that same time. You scheduled the euthanasia when you saw a sharp decline. It’s not your fault he declined more rapidly than you could reasonably have expected.