I picked him up and swatted him on the back, thinking that he might be choking. I probed his throat with my pinky, in case something was stuck in there. Nothing. He just kept twitching as I held him, his heart beating at a rapid and irregular tempo. Then it stopped. His heart went from doing back flips in his chest to stillness. He stopped breathing.
Not knowing how to administer CPR to a cat, I winged it. I plunged my thumb into his heart several times, but that didn't seem to help. I plugged his nose with my finger and blew a short breath into his mouth. Nothing. Again, I blew into his tiny cat mouth; then he blew chunks onto me. He vomited on my face and shoulder. Some went into my mouth. Somehow the relief I felt at seeing him breathing again tempered what should have been one of the most disgusting things I've ever experienced. My cat had just vomited in my mouth, yet I sobbed with thankful tears of joy.
I held him for the next several hours, expecting him to die. He did not. He was a pathetic husk of his former self. He weighed almost nothing. He couldn't always focus both of his eyes together. He could not walk to his food dish and would not eat when I carried him there. He drank enormous amounts of water, only to throw most of it back up. He'd lost over three pounds since his last vet visit two weeks ago.
He was clearly dying. I had interrupted this process by giving him a desperate attempt at feline CPR. I did not want to let him go, but he was ready. He was suffering.
On Friday I took Miles to the vet. His x-rays confirmed he was in bad shape. His kidneys were huge. Blood work from earlier in the month established that they had lost 75 percent of their function. They said with about 90 percent certainty that he had cancer. They said that I had bought him a few more days, but that his condition was "grave." I thought that was an interesting choice of words. It made me think again about where I would bury him. I chose to have him put down. While it would suck for me to let him go, to choose to have him euthanized, it was the best thing I could do for him, and a choice he couldn't make.
I don't know exactly what was in the first shot they gave him, but is was some seriously good stuff. He quickly and peacefully drifted into a deep sleep. The next injection stopped his heart.
I considered taking him home to bury him under my Japanese Maple tree, but the idea of driving home with my dead cat in the passenger seat, digging a hole in the rain, and finally burying him seemed more than I could handle. I opted to have him cremated.
I feel somewhat foolish that I interrupted his first attempt at dying on my kitchen floor for free, then spent $426.50 to have a vet complete the process two days later. It wasn't something I thought about in the moment; I just reacted. Giving CPR to my cat is probably going to be laughably absurd at some point in the future, but it was the best I could come up with at the time.
He's been gone for five days now. As I wait from the vet to call me to come pick up his ashes, my brain has not quite accepted that he is gone yet. I keep thinking I see him, only to realize that I've spotted a Glad bag or a pillow, not my dead cat.
