this is endless

https://love-and-shadows.tumblr.com/

Little Bit died on Friday. He was only five and a half years old. He was diagnosed with aggressive large cell intestinal lymphoma in early February, which we knew was incurable, but we had hoped to be able to buy him more time. All spring the chemo would work and make him feel better for a week or two, then the cancer would become resistant and he’d decline again, then we’d try another protocol that would work briefly, then he’d decline again. A week ago, the tumor came back with a vengeance and the vet told us there was nothing more that they could do, so we settled in to spend as much time with him as we could before we lost him. The last week we had with him was incredibly beautiful, and we got to say goodbye in so many wonderful ways. It hurts too much to write about, but it fills my heart. The part I need to talk about, to try to figure out how to process and understand, is how he died.  Thursday he stopped eating and seemed to have trouble using the bathroom, so we knew the end was likely near. We took him outside at night and he played with a stick and then curled up in the garden, and Julian and I sat there with him for a good hour, just listening to the cricket and frogs. It was beautiful, and it made me feel like we’d made the right decision to let him die at home, on his own time. We took him back inside and he started to decline pretty rapidly: breathing heavily and unable to keep food or water down. So we settled in for the final haul, and for the most part we stayed calm. Julian held him as he vomited, cleaned him up. We talked to him, I read a couple chapters of Treasure Island out loud, we told him it was okay to let go. We slept on the floor in the living room with him, expecting him to go in his sleep in the night, but he held on.  In the morning, we gave him more gabapentin (an anti-anxiety drug and sort of pain killer--the only thing the vet would give us, despite her promise to provide us with meds to help his passing). He started having rattling sighs and twitching and constricting his muscles, so I knew the end was near. We stayed by him for hours, talking to him, telling him it was okay, making him comfortable. We had opted not to euthanize him because our vet wouldn’t allow us to go in with him for the procedure, and I didn’t want him to be alone and afraid in his last moments of consciousness.  Then, suddenly, he started gagging and released a huge pool of blood from his mouth, and contorted his body into an unnatural position, with his neck bent backwards. It was horrific, and terrifying, and not something I’d ever seen happen with any other animal death. I called my mom in a panic, and she brought over some opiates that had been prescribed for her cat after his surgery, and helped us to move him outside into a sunny spot that he loved. I carried him into the backyard with his head against my shoulder, his whole body completely limp, but still breathing. Once he was settled, we waited a bit to see if he would die quickly on his own. He didn’t. So, I gave him the first dose of opiates, his head in Julian’s hands. His body went even more relaxed, but he still held on. So I gave him a second, and then a third. As I gave him the third, his body had shut down so that he couldn’t swallow, but I could see his tongue lapping, trying not to drown. Then, in that second, he grabbed Julian’s hands with both paws and then passed.  This moment has haunted me since. I don’t know if he was truly alive after he started vomiting blood, which likely happened due to some kind of cardiovascular event or an organ rupturing. I hope that he wasn’t. My biggest fear is that it wasn’t the releasing effect of the opiates that killed him, but that he died drowning on the medicine. He hated being given medicine, and I couldn’t stand if that was the last thing he experienced. I’m trying very hard to ignore the voice in the back of my head shouting at me that I killed him violently. The whole thing was so traumatic, and the loss of him so huge for me, that I don’t even know how to write about it or process it in a way that feels real or honest. I feel like my whole body is on fire, and that all I can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope that the pain eventually calms. I miss him so much. I would do anything for this not to have happened.