Farewell to Sweet Elroy

This is officially the hardest blog post I've ever had to write.  I almost decided I couldn't do it, but then I realized that if I'm going to chronicle our lives with our Buddies, I can't leave out the hard parts.  The agonizing parts.  The parts so excruciating that it seems that I can't even make myself type the words.  Because these parts, too, are part of the story of falling in love with and living with our buddies.

We buried Elroy on Wednesday.  I realize I gave very little warning that this might happen, but it was pretty sudden, on the whole, for us too.  

Sean started noticing in December that Elroy seemed to be losing some weight.  We had always taken it as a point of pride that he, our FIV-positive kitty, was one of the two most robust cats in the house.  Not only was he one of the heftiest, but he could also zip up and down the stairs like they were nothing and tear around the house at the speed of light.  He was healthy, or so we thought.  We knew he was happy, and nothing on that front seemed to have changed.  

But we took him to the vet just to see what the weight loss was about.  He had lost about three pounds but the blood-work showed absolutely nothing.   So we arranged for a second test, since his thyroid levels were slightly elevated, but not really out of range.  When we brought him back, the tech pointed out that he had lost another pound.  In two weeks.  I immediately made him another appointment.  The vet did an x-ray, and it turned out he had bronchitis as well as a large mass in his abdomen.  We scheduled an ultrasound for the next day.  The mass was confirmed, and we scheduled surgery for the following Monday.  When the vet went in to do the surgery, she found not only a golf-ball-plus-sized mass, but also about 100 little masses, clustered all around his abdominal cavity.  She took out the big one, re-sectioned his bowels in two places, and closed him up.  She said that if that thing had kept growing, he would have been unable to make a bowel movement in a matter of days.  Add to that the fact that the mass actually ruptured while in surgery.  It was perfect timing, because if it had done that at home, while, say, jumping off the bed, he would have died probably within minutes or hours.  He made a speedy and miraculous recovery from the surgery and amazed the techs and the vets by sitting complacently up in the enclosure after his surgery as though nothing had happened.

We considered ourselves, and our little buddy, lucky.  We had made up our minds to do chemo and a naturopathic remedy in-between the chemo treatments.  With any luck, the small nodules would respond to the chemo and would never become a problem.  We kept our fingers crossed.

He came home, wanted some food, then promptly vomited it back up.  That was expected--it was not unusual to have that happen after major abdominal surgery.  The next day, he drank a bunch of water, held it down for a few hours, then projectile-vomited it back up as well.  No big deal, the vets told us.  This is to be expected.  His stomach will calm down soon and he'll be able to eat. 

The next morning, he had what looked like a hallucination and threw himself against the dog crate we'd bought specifically so that he couldn't move around too much and hurt himself.  Sean and I took apart the guest bed so that he could come out of the crate and hang out with us on the mattress.  We figured he couldn't hurt himself that way, and he couldn't hide under the bed when it was time to administer his medicine.  Except when I came home from work and we watched him coming out of the crate again, he collapsed coming out.  We put him back on his feet and he collapsed again. Back to the vet we went.

It turned out he was in Acute Kidney Failure.  They put him on a drip with fluids and a bunch of other drugs, and we had to leave him there overnight.  It was a very sleepless night for us.  I couldn't get the thought out of my head that he was going to die all alone at the vet with nobody to comfort him.  It was torture.  

But we got there the next day, and he had made it through the night, and his kidney values had improved!  We were ecstatic!  Unfortunately, he still didn't want to eat, and now he was drooling and foaming at the mouth excessively.  At first we thought it was because of one of the drugs he'd been given, which sometimes causes that reaction.  But then the salivating didn't stop.  We tried offering him small bits of food and water.  He didn't eat the food and he kept throwing up the water.

For two more days, we brought him back to the vet at 8:00am for his fluids, then picked him up at 10:30pm to take him home to snuggle with us on the mattress.  In between, we brought him T-shirts of Sean's that we had liberally rubbed all over Otto's scent glands.  This always seemed to perk Elroy up.  We went to visit Elroy for hours, taking him into the visiting room to sit with us and walk around.  Some days we were elated by what seemed to be his imminent improvement.  Other days we quietly cried as he seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from us, somewhere dark and scary where we couldn't follow.  We stroked him endlessly, spoke to him lovingly, told him stories about when we first found him, tried to keep him from harming himself by jumping too far.

Elroy with his Big Buddy

One of his better days

After Sunday came and went and he still hadn't eaten and was still throwing up water, we made plans to do a second surgery this past Monday.  The thinking was that he must have a secondary blockage that was keeping him from being able to digest water and food.  If we could resolve the blockage, we might be able to reverse this trend and get him to eat again. 

We were willing to try.  The alternatives were just too grim:  letting him starve to death slowly, or euthanasia.  Neither was an option.

On Saturday and Sunday, he seemed in good spirits.  Though sequestered in the guest room with one of us for his own safety, he played with another cat under the door (we may never know which one) and made a really acrobatic leap up to the dresser. All this he did without having had any food in a week.  At one point, we let him out of the room and he ran easily down the steep upstairs stairs, then all the way down to the basement. He spent some time wandering around the ground floor.  He seemed to want to keep fighting.  The vet's office was impressed. 

On Sunday night, we let Otto into the room with us for what turned out to be his last visit with Elroy.  He slowly approached him, stuck out his neck and gently sniffed Elroy's nose, then the inside of his ear, for more than a few seconds.  Then he withdrew and quietly walked out of the room.  We didn't know it then, but we know it now:  he was saying goodbye.

On Monday afternoon, we put Elroy in the carrier, for what turned out to be the last time.  He seemed more upset than he usually was.  When he was hurting and ill a few weeks ago, he had been growling in the carrier, which had been a first for him.  This time he mewed plaintively as we made the sad trek back to the vet over the Blue Ridge Parkway.  To this day, Elroy is the only one of our cats who's ever been on the Parkway.  I'll never be able to be on it again without thinking of him.

We got to the vet's office and I had been there for less than ten minutes when I realized I'd left my phone in the truck, which I'd changed out at home to take him in the car.  I had planned to leave him and come back, but because I didn't have my phone, I didn't feel comfortable doing so.  What if the vet needed me urgently for something and she couldn't reach me?  So I stayed.  We put Elroy back on his drip in his carrier, and I put my hand in with him to comfort him and talk to him.  He was visited at one point by a dog who looked startlingly like my boxer-mix nephew, Newman.  

Finally, it was time to take him back.  The surgery went well.  Turned out he had grown adhesions, which had combined with some nodules to fold over some of his bowels, making the food incapable of going any farther with his stomach.  Mystery solved, but would the adhesions return?  What would we do then?  He couldn't just keep not eating.  I tried not to think about it too hard.  They took out another section of bowels, and removed his spleen, also diseased with cancer.  Prescribed more antibiotics because now he also had aspiration pneumonia from all the vomiting.

Sean showed up just as they were finishing.  We waited, happy that Elroy had survived another surgery.  We saw them bring him in and set him up in another enclosure, similar to the one in which we'd been visiting him for the last week.  He looked okay.  He looked alert.  He looked right at me. The vet tech was intravenously administering his antibiotics and pain meds.  He'd come through his last surgery like a champ.  Why shouldn't he again?

Twenty to thirty minutes later, the vet came rushing in with Elroy in a blanket.  The look on her face nearly made my heart stop.  "He's not doing well," she said urgently.  "I need you to hold him.  He may not make it."  

It was like a living nightmare.  Our sweet, beloved Elroy was on our laps, fighting for his life, while the vet administered epinephrine to try to get his increasingly slow heart rate to speed up.  He was making short gasps of breath that ripped my heart from my chest every time he did it.  Suddenly it became clear to me that this was where he was going to leave us.  There was no recovering from this.  Sean kept talking to him through his tears, telling him to hang on, that we love him and were doing everything we could to help him.  The vet stuck close, checking his heart frequently and monitoring his vitals.  She said he was crashing again and gave him another epi shot.  She asked if we wanted heroic measures to save his life.  With cats, that would mean cracking open his chest and massaging his heart back to life.  Sean and I looked at each other and silently agreed that no, we were going to let him go on his own terms, with the dignity that he deserved.  I would like to say that was a hard decision, but after everything he had been through in the last week, it seemed like the least we could do for him.  Also, she told us that this sometimes bought a few hours, but that they usually crashed again after that.

The vet left us alone and we cried over him as he took his last breaths.  His heart took a really long time to stop beating.  I worried for hours that he wasn't really dead--that maybe some trick of chemicals--anesthesia, pain meds, etc.--had conspired to slow down his heart but keep him alive.  Elroy was our little Sunshine.  How could he possibly be gone?  Wasn't there some saying about the sun always coming up in the morning--that it was the one thing you could always count on?

We talked to the vet for hours after his death, just trying to process.  We had come in separate cars, so we drove him home in a two-car caravan that seemed to me an awful lot like a funeral procession.  We let the cats sniff us when we got home.  Most of the cats looked concerned, and Wanda freaked out and jumped off and under the bed.  They knew.  Their loyal little friend wasn't coming back.

I think I've described Elroy's personality in previous posts, but it would be hard to truly understand his beautiful little soul unless you'd lived with it.  Elroy seemed to shine white light all the time. He was happy every single day of his life with us, and let us know it.  He rarely had a bad day, or even a bad moment.  Even when he was ill and feeling miserable his last week on earth, he still found things to be happy about.  Elroy also had an innocence about him that the other cats don't seem to have.  Reggie can be sort of cynical, for example.  Mister is prickly, and Otto and Wanda are both just really mature and kind of preternaturally smart.  Zelda's kind of like Elroy, too, but then again, she's still really young.  Elroy seemed to be always a kitten.  He was Otto's little shadow.  He was excited about everything.  He approached everything in life with love and joy and eagerness.  I think the fact that he did made this whole experience that much harder for his big buddies.

We know we did everything we could.  We know we gave him good food and clean, filtered water and natural supplements for his health and lots of love and cuddles and playtime.  But it still doesn't seem like enough.  It doesn't seem as though we'll ever be able to repay him for all he gave us.  Tangible, daily proof of the good in this world.  Undying love and loyalty.  Copious morning head bunts and hugs with his prehensile tail.  We'll miss his happy chirrups and his open, sunny face.  We'll miss his beautiful tuxedo markings with the front that didn't ever seem to quite "button."  We'll miss the fact that he spent almost every night of his life sitting in the windows, guarding our house from other cats.  I guess he figured that, after all the time Sean had spent guarding Elroy's food from the raccoons when he was a young tyke in North Charleston, it was the least he could do.  Our Little Sentinel, we would sometimes call him.

We also called him Elroodle, Boodles, Elroodle-Boodle, Elrillow-Pillow (because he liked for us to lay with our heads on his back or side), and Roodle-Doodle Stinky Noodle.  I have this wild impulse to put one of those nicknames on his grave marker, because they all seem to fit him better than Elroy, and we called him those more.  

On the other hand, "his boy Elroy" seems to fit pretty well, too.  

We love and miss you, buddy.  More than you will ever know.  You'll always be our little Sunshine.  Our little Sentinel.  Our little Boodles.

Boodles with his Buddies Wanda and Otto

From another angle

I prefer to remember him like this:  in the bosom of his beloved family.

A day before he went in for his first surgery

Never far from his best friends