Breaking Every Paradigm - Curating Life, Love & The Wonder of Being

When Science and the Inexplicable Collide

April 24 arrived, we were taken to a room with a big window facing out onto the beautiful nature of Sweden. The sun shone on him while the vet injected him with the initial sedative which would make him fall asleep in advance of the final injection. After he was sedated our little dog focussed on looking out the window at the trees, and watching the flowers bending in the breeze. He continued to watch intently out the window for almost the whole time, as though he could see something we could not. Just before he fell asleep from the sedative, he turned his nose to mine and touched it, holding it there for perhaps ten seconds while he struggled to stay on his feet, then he slowly turned his head and did the same to my husband who was on the other side of him. Then he laid down and lost consciousness. We knew he knew, we knew he was saying goodbye. What we didn't know was what he was going to face, if anything, once his life here with us ended. At that time I had a few thoughts on the matter, but they were mine to mull over. I was quite sure however, that once he died, that my dog, as I knew him would be permanently gone.

It comforted me to rationally accept the laws of nature, and not torment myself with what if's and the illusion of a doggie heaven. He had been alive on Earth since March 2010 and had endured a terrible illness that was going to end to his life, so we chose to save him the horror of a certain death by violence by humanely putting him down. We knew we had given him the maximum possible amount of time before he would have died on his own. Perhaps we cut his life short by a few days at most. But we knew we did the right thing, even if it broke our hearts. The vet came back in and placed the needle in his vein and gave him the final injection. Silently, we watched him die. Then when she said he was gone, we wept. When we finally left, by a door just outside the room, I did the strangest thing. I looked back at that patch of grass he had been looking at so intently before he said his goodbyes...and I waved. I felt he was there. Rationally, I cannot explain it. But it felt right to wave. It gave me peace.

In April 2011, I found a little cat barely surviving in the wild. After six painstaking months of taming him and gaining his trust, he chose to be my friend and moved in with us on Oct 5, 2011. He was the most wonderful, affectionate, compassionate, sentient companion I have ever had. It saddens me so much to accept we were only able to give him five months (out of the five years our vet assumed he had lived) in a loving home before a reaction to a routine cortisone injection by our vet set the wheels in motion for his tragic end. On March 30 this year, when I took him to the vet because he was not eating, they told me he had developed DKA, most likely because of the cortisone injection. They said that even with intensive care at the hospital his chance for survival was 30%. Euthanisia was suggested as a solution. I refused to give up on him. We rushed him to the hospital and there he remained for 5 days on a drip, everyday we drove the two hour return trip to visit him and keep his spirits up.

The vets were impressed with his recovery and when we brought him home he needed insulin injections and careful monitoring, but we were optimistic. Then, before we were able to get him stable on the insulin, he developed an infection in his cornea, and even though I took him in as soon as I could get an appointment, when the vet examined him, it was already so severe she thought our cat might lose his eye. He must have been in agony. I was given a complicated treatment regime of five medications that had to be given to him on rotation every two hours, two of which gave him such severe reactions that a blood vessel burst in his eye and he had to be taken back to the hospital. We were on a knife-edge to keep him eating enough so we could continue to give him insulin. Then he lost his best friend, our little dog. hey were very close and we knew he would notice his absence. He cried for him the first day, and we supported him all we could.

A fews days after we lost our dog, our cat seemed to be improving. We felt tentatively optimistic. The treatments continued round the clock, but then out of the blue, he refused to eat, and when I coaxed a little into him, he threw it back up again. He went away and curled up in a little ball. We went back to the hospital, if he didn't eat, he couldn't have insulin. Our worst nightmare had begun. The vet felt that our cat now had too much insulin in him since it might be that the cortisone had finally worn off. We cut back the insulin, had fluids injected into him and brought him home. Every day was a battle, to get him to eat, to keep him interested in life, but we were losing. In desperation we stopped the insulin completely, and he began to improve by the next day. But the day after that, he stopped eating again and started to curl up tight beside the empty dog basket and wouldn't leave it. He had never slept there before, so we knew something was wrong.