(Copied from my e-mail to Paws Inn on Thursday 5th May as the wording seemed right for their Rainbow Bridge post too, although in my saddened state I got the ages wrong so have corrected these in the post below.)
Sad news I'm afraid. Momo and Cassidy have both passed away, within weeks of each other.
Momo disappeared after we moved house (we kept the cats in for way longer than a few weeks, so it wasn't that). We think he just got lost with it being a new build estate and everything looking and smelling the same. He may have been trying to find the old house, we don't know. He was found a week later, a mile away, having been hit by a car. He had pneumothorax, broken ribs, head trauma, broken jaw and a tail pull injury. He had his jaw wired, two operations to amputate his tail and never regained proper toilet function. He spent the best part of a year in a pen in our kitchen, he had a 1cm gap between two of his lower vertebrate and a slip onto his tail end off a chair would have put us back to square one. He had multiple organ failure and peritonitis and went from his usual self one day to howling in pain with blood in his urine the next. He became unresponsive after observation at the vet's so we agreed to have him PTS. This was the day before Good Friday.
About 5 days later, Cassidy started making horrible yowling noises and collapsed. We took him to the out of hours vet who said he had bad arrhythmia and they put him on Oxygen and IV fluids. He was sent to another branch where he was put under a veterinary cardiologist's care. Cassidy had serious heart failure and we were told he had a few months to a year left. They stabilised him and we took him home. He was doing well on his nine tablets a day (thankfully, as you may remember, he was quite an easy cat to give tablets to) and we managed to get his breathing rate down to somewhere near normal. We made the most of the time we had with him and gave him lots of cuddles. We had been told several years ago he had a very minor heart murmur and it had obviously progressed fairly suddenly, leaving him with an enlarged heart.
This morning, Cassidy started to make the horrible yowling sounds again. We found him collapsed on the kitchen floor, semi-conscious with his tail drooping and his back legs splayed behind him. We had been warned that he might black out again, so I said we should wait for signs of him regaining consciousness before moving him. After a few minutes he started to move his front legs so we took him to the vet. They put him on Oxygen and tested his back legs and tail, discovering he had no feeling in hind legs or tail, no movement and white skin in both. The vet said Cassidy had a breakaway blood clot because of his enlarged heart. Ironically, his heart rate was good, showing that the tablet regime was working. We got told that at this stage, most cats are PTS. Those that are not go on to live for a maximum of two weeks, paralysed and in constant pain. Given that information, we made the best choice for him and said goodbye this morning. We stayed with him as he took his last breath and peacefully slipped away.
RIP Momo 2004 - 2016
RIP Cassidy 2003 - 2016
Thank you to Paws Inn for giving us nearly 11 years with our wonderful furry companions. I hope they are playing on the Rainbow Bridge with Buster, Minimopsical and their other Paws Inn friends and having a cuddle with Teresa.
