How Do You Say Good-Bye?

Helping Me With My Filing
Originally uploaded by mkb_nf.

Some time ago I introduced you to my cat, Natasha (see Under the (not so) watchful eye of Natasha). Well, I guess sme time has past since I first posted that entry back in July of last year.

You see at the time Natasha had a lump in her belly. I had put off getting it looked at for some time, thinking it was just a sign of age (as she was somewhere between eleven and fourteen years old). When I finally took her in last August and they checked on the mass we discovered that it was cancer. The vet removed the tumour, but it was an active mass and based on its size they gave her about a year.

That took me back a bit, but after a week or so she had returned to normal and I simply thouight that maybe she could beat the odds. Five months later another mass appeared. After consulting with the vet agin, we decided against an aggressive treatment of radition and chemo - as she was an older cat anyway and I felt that this was simply needless torture at this stage in her life. We began a treatment of a igh dose of steriods to keep her appetite intact, to keep her joints loose, and as a way to fight the cancer. For the next three months things went well, there was very little spread of the mass and only trace signs of additional masses, so it was recommended that we reduce her steriod dosage to once daily - which was good for us, as we were leaving (my first then two weeks later Lisa joined me) and we would need someone to come in and check on Natasha only daily now (instead of twice daily).

Well, when we returned two and a half weeks later the masses hd spread significantly. A month later we began to notice some changes in her appetite and her behavior, which brought us back to the vet today. After x-rays it appears that the cancer has spread to her lungs and we were told that whileshe is not in pain, there is some discomfort and we have days, maybe a week or two left with her.

For the first year and a half that I had Natasha, it was just me and her. I as living in Hull (just outside Ottawa). I only had her for a few months when I quite a good job in the Senate to move to British Columbia to run a friend's campaign. When that ended aburptly, I was unable to get back into politics at the level that I had left and spent about six weeks without a job and then another seven months in a private sector job that I did like much. During that entire time it was just me and my cat, and for the most part no one else.

After I moved back to Newfoundland I got my teaching degree one year and spent the next substitute teaching. It was at this point that I moved to Bonavista to take a teaching position there. While I had met Lisa at this stage and she would come out one out of every four to six weekends for the first year or two (which increased to once every four weekends by the third year and once every second weekend by the fourth year), again for the most part it was Natasha and I.

I can still remember coming home from school at the end of the day and she would be sitting on the back of the couch, watching the door waiting for me. I'd say "Hi girl" and she'd meow. I'd ask her how her day was and she'd meow. We'd probably keep this up for two or three minutes. If I'd lie down on the couch after supper and fall asleep watching the news, which was a regular occurance, I'd wake up with Natasha curled up in the small of my back more often than not. When I went to bed, she'd start off each night up nea my arm and would end up down by my feet by the time I woke up.

And after today, I have an unofficial cut off date in mind when if she hasn't gotten worse b this date, we'll visit the vet one last time. I know this may sound selfish, and I do know that it is best and I have no intention of letting her suffer - she simply deserves that from me for the companionship that she has given to me over the years - but I still struggle thinking about the next week or so. Knowing that for the first few days, I have writing commitments and classes and can't simply sit and scratch her head and rub her back - I just don't know what to make of it all. As you can probably tell, this is the first real pet that I will have lost. Sitting here, searching for a way to end this entry, I had hoped that writing this would help the process - not really sure if it has or not.

Tags: cat, Flickr