Thomas

Early Thursday morning our sweet Thomas died. He was twenty-one years old.

For the last day or so he'd been wheezing a little bit, and at about three in the morning he was making so much noise with every breath that he woke us both. He was curled up on the foot of the bed, his head bobbing up and down and his abdomen sucking in with with the effort of every breath. There was a puddle of urine on the floor; he had been too weak to go down to the basement, but was still sweet and well-mannered enough to get off the bed to pee.

I realized he would have to go to the vet right away, and I was pretty sure this was it for him. Blake woke up the girls to say goodbye while I got dressed and called a cab.

The receptionist at the vet called the triage nurse who took Thomas into the back straight away. I was asked to wait in a examining room. After a few minutes the vet came out -- she was short, pretty, youngish, a little plump, with a pierced lip.

She said Thomas had fluid around his lungs --- pleural effusion. It might be caused by heart disease, a tumour, or it might be idiopathic --- caused by nothing in particular. Heart disease, after being confirmed by a cardiologist, could be treated (with an unpredictable degree of success) with medicine. A tumour could only be treated with surgery, and the only treatment for idiopathic pleural effusion would be to drain it, keep Thomas in the clinic for twelve hours, and see how long the fluid took to come back.

Surgery was out of the question, and I didn't see much point in putting Thomas on yet more medicine. Draining and waiting would be torture. I asked for a minute to talk to Blake on the phone, and we decided it was time.

The vet agreed that this was a sensible course of action, and the nurses brought Thomas into the little examining room and gave me a few minutes to say goodbye. They brought a tank of oxygen so he wouldn't have to work so hard to breathe, which was wonderful except it made him seem like his old self again; he was breathing so easily, I didn't know if we had made the right choice. It wasn't until he had his face away from the oxygen for a few minutes that he started to wheeze again and I remembered how miserable he'd been.

I gave him lots of scratches, and whispered to him what a good cat he was, what a handsome boy, how much we loved him and how much we would miss him. At first he lay there, but soon he half-stood and start to nose around the examining table. The vet had put in an IV line in his left foreleg, taped with blue tape, and he shook his leg in irritation. I kept wanting to say "It's okay, it will be off soon," but I couldn't. He gently head-butted me one, two, three times. He was never very affectionate, but the awkward head-butt was his quiet way of showing love.

Finally, after a lot of tears, the vet came in and talked a little bit about what would happen. She let me stroke Thomas as she injected the drugs. He didn't die as quickly as Mimi had -- she was gone before the syringe was half-empty, but Thomas took a little longer. Not much, though; within seconds his head came to rest chin-down on the table and he was still. His eyes were open but empty, like the eyes of an Egyptian statue. He was still beautiful.

The vet let me have another moment alone with him; I kissed him on the head and told him again that I loved him, then started to go out the door. I was about to close it behind me but changed my mind and went back in for one more stroke, one more kiss, one more look at my beautiful grey boy.