This is about my Caramel, the last kitty, the mama. I call her my spirit-guide.

The kitty who brought her two litters to my door and to my neighbor’s door in 2004. I took her in in 2005 with two of her boys. My neighbor took one from the first litter and one from the same as mine.

She hasn’t been well for months and every issue has been addressed with hopes of keeping her around as long as possible, in good health. She has been in and out of the emergency hospital and has been at our veterinarians’ several times a month since major surgery where a huge cancerous cyst was found in her throat. It was a rare cancer which was one of two ever reported. She came home, she soldiered on and began to eat and look better.

And then, suddenly she began to let out shrieks, screams that blew me out of my chair. I had no idea why, but I began to see they were related to eating. Was there so much scar tissue in her throat that she couldn’t swallow? She began eating less and less, drinking a lot of water. Her thyroid meds were adjusted and changed, still she was sleeping more, not localizing to sound. Sometimes she looked disoriented.

Back to the vet and was given fluid. Sue, at the vet fed her, a post-op food, by hand several times.

We went home. She stopped eating. We went back to the vet.  Now I was crawling on the floor with a spoon trying to get her to eat. It worked for a while and then the shrieks. She’s would look at food and run away. She would hide; that is an indication of the worst possible scenario.

Back to the vet. There are three vets who alternate, on heavy days they might all be there, at other times maybe one. So a patient might not always see the same vet in an emergency; because of holidays and absences, various people were treating her. The vet that removed the cancer said her mouth was in bad shape, but that was put aside due to the cancer issues. Now, something was wrong, very wrong and here we were again, this time with Dr. John, aka the Cat Whisperer, who, last Friday looked in her mouth and said there were abscesses in the jaw and the oral cavity; he was the first vet to finally hear the shriek when he opened her mouth.

He sent me home with a hug and a promise to address the issue. He wanted me to have a Happy Mother’s Day. When we left Caramel there last Friday evening, it was the first time in ages I felt free, unencumbered and relaxed, the premise being that the pain was tooth related.

This morning we were prepared to speak to the vet and to subsequently let go of our beloved pet, based on  yesterday’s  conversation.  I was assuming that we weren’t looking at anything good. I called.

“She’s eating.”
Ok, so the letting go is now on hold until they have a better grip on what is going on.

He felt she could “go home.” I had already played all the scenes of losing my pet, she was already gone, I was making peace with it. Did I misunderstand something? Didn’t we talk about oral cancer? At least the possibility of it? Didn’t he say her mouth was a mess and that he thought it was a squamous cell carcinoma? Is he going to do  a biopsy? Is it just a bad infection?

“She’s eating.” In vet-cat language that means she isn’t ready for the rainbow bridge. That there still is hope and she is NOT ready to go.

As they say in The Game of Thrones: