The Death of a (Furry) Family Member: My Recent Trip to the Emergency Vet

Or: Why I take my cats’ health seriously.

My partner and I have four cats. I’ve talked a lot about them in other articles — how I’m very much a cat person, how we don’t plan to have kids, and how I’ve (sort of) embraced the Cat Dad life.

As a quick rundown of our current four cats, we have two seven-year-old brothers from the same litter (both black cats), one five-year-old girl who is also all black, and another five-year-old girl who is a gray tabby. They were all strays; the black cats came to us from other people, while the gray tabby showed up on our porch, decided that she lived here now, and just never left.

The two black brothers — Jello and Billy Jo — initially came with a third brother named Darby. The trio came to us at six weeks old and are named after punk rockers — and oh man did they live up to the punk rock names. They were tiny black terrors, rampaging around the house and getting into all sorts of things.

We got the black female, Katsu, two years after the boys, also as a six-week-old kitten. She was a feisty thing, and she wound up forcing her way into the trio of brothers until they had no choice but to accept her. For a while, we had a quartet of black cats.

Then, in October of that year, Darby got sick. He started acting lethargic on a Friday evening; by Saturday morning, he wasn’t moving very much and wasn’t eating. My partner and I had a pre-planned event that evening, so we decided to give him a day and see how he was on Sunday. He hadn’t improved.

We took him to an emergency vet, who found that his temperature was low and his organs seemed to be shutting down. They planned on keeping him the night for observation and moving him to a different vet specialist in the morning; however, we got a call late Sunday night to let us know that we needed to move him now as his temperature was dropping rapidly.

We piled into the car, drove 20 minutes to the emergency vet, picked up Darby, and drove him another 20 minutes to the specialist. They accepted him immediately and got him on life support. We asked them to do everything they could for him.

Monday night, we went to visit him after I got off work. They were able to let us into the back to see him for a few minutes, which we were incredibly thankful for. Darby had always been the feistiest brother, and when we got back to see him, he immediately recognized us and tried to jump out of his second-tier kennel to see us, even though he was hooked up to several tubes and a warming blanket.

He was in bad shape. He couldn’t regulate his temperature by himself, and his organs were failing for reasons that nobody could figure out. He was on several fluids and medications to keep him going, but it didn’t look good. Still, he was active and seemed to recognize us, and we showered him with love for the few minutes we could steal with him before the vet techs escorted us out. I broke down in tears in the parking lot.

They called early on Tuesday morning, sometime around 5 a.m., to let us know that Darby had gone into cardiac arrest and that they were starting lifesaving measures. The conversation was short, but my partner and I knew what was coming. We got dressed and piled into the car to drive the 40-ish minutes to the specialist. They called not long after we left the house to tell us he had passed.

When we got there, they let us see him one last time. I gave him some last pets, said goodbye, and cried. I cried hard, ugly tears, something I hadn’t experienced in so long. It had been literal decades since I’d had a good, proper cry, and Darby had made me cry twice in as many days. It was one of the worst moments of my adult life.

We picked up his ashes on the night of Halloween. It was a fitting time for us to pick up the remains of our black cat. We are both Halloweeny people, and normally the holiday is fun for us, but not that year.

Unfortunately, this would be a harbinger of the next six months. Our lives fell apart after that — the other cats got sick in succession (although they all pulled through), my relationship with my family more or less ended, I lost the vast majority of my savings rescuing my mother-in-law from a housing issue, and I experienced strong suicidal urges for the first time in a long time.

All of it was under the shadow of my cat whose life had been taken far too early. He was just over two years old, a young adult cat who should’ve had many more years of terrorizing our household. I still miss him dearly.

I eventually figured out that the reason I’d reacted so strongly to Darby’s passing was that he was the first cat that was well and truly mine. My family had cats when I was growing up, but my dad was very pragmatic about them — when they died, he didn’t really mourn them, he just had the vet dispose of them.

My partner was different. She kept the cremated remains of her pets, usually in a place of honor in the household and guarded by a mummified cat Halloween decoration named Ted. She formed strong emotional connections with her pets, and their loss was the loss of a family member.

I found out early on that I liked her method of connection to pets more than my father’s. So, when Darby passed, I found out just how much of a bond I had formed with him. He was my family as much as my partner, and his loss left a hole in my heart.

This story became relevant recently when the tabby cat, Toner, became lethargic this past weekend. She snubbed her food on Friday and began acting lethargic. We managed to get her to eat a little gravy from some wet food in the evening, but nothing else. On Saturday morning, my partner woke up early and found that she was very lethargic. We took her to the emergency vet immediately.

As we packed her up into her cat carrier and drove her the 20 minutes to the now-familiar emergency vet, neither my partner nor I had to say anything to know we were both thinking about Darby. This was the same set of circumstances — lethargy, snubbing food, and general lack of movement. She wasn’t even crying that much as we drove to the vet, which was very unusual.

We arrived at the vet, and they came to get her from the car (due to COVID restrictions and renovations, we couldn’t go into the building). We sat nervously in the car as the vets examined her, unsure of what the results would be.

Eventually, they called to talk about what was going on with her. Our cat, the vet said, was perfectly normal. Her temperature was normal, she was reasonably hydrated, there were no abnormal lumps in her abdomen, and she felt like she had stool in her digestive tract. All things considered, she was fairly healthy. He offered to run blood tests (which we accepted) and do an x-ray (which we declined), and we waited for another 45 minutes or so to hear back.

Her blood tests came back normal as well. Her white and red blood cell counts were fine, there were no signs of infection or disease, and nothing was out of the ordinary. All we could really do, he said, was take her home and keep an eye on her. If anything happened, we could always bring her back.

We thanked him, paid the bill (just over $300 — cats can be expensive buggers), and went home. My partner griped about how the vet had a horrible bedside manner — he was very matter-of-fact, which I suspect comes from being an emergency vet, but it was something to focus on. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening on the couch with our cat.

Over the next few days, she improved quite a bit. She’s now much more active and no longer lethargic, and has been slowly eating more each day. As far as we can tell, she’s more or less back to normal. We will continue to keep an eye on her, but it seems like things are improving.

However, any time this happens, we feel the echoes of Darby. When one of our cats seems sick, we both flash back to it — if we had gone to the vet on Saturday instead of Sunday, could we have saved him? What could we have done differently so he would still be here?

Realistically, we both know that we probably couldn’t have prevented Darby from dying. His organs failed incredibly rapidly, and the vets never figured out why. An extra day of vet care most likely wouldn’t have helped.

However, it now informs our decisions whenever any of the cats seem sick. We could have easily given Toner an extra day to see how things went, and based on what happened, she would’ve been fine and recovered. However, both of us had Darby in our heads, so instead of waiting, we took her right away. Better to go now and find out that it’s nothing than to wait a day and find out that it’s too late.

Honestly, that approach has paid off a few times. Both Katsu and Toner have experienced urinary infections, and our early intervention prevented a lot of complications down the line. Overall, the “better safe than sorry” approach has helped more often than not.

Even when it turns out to be nothing, as it did this time, I’d rather spend a little money and know for sure. Our cats will never be surrogate children for us, but they are still family, and I want them to be healthy and happy so I can spend as much time with them as I can.

It is interesting to me how the death of a cat — a pet to some, an animal to others, a family member to me — has informed my viewpoints on this kind of thing. I want my cats to be happy and healthy, so I take them for their checkups, I feed them expensive prescription food, and I make sure they have good running water from a fountain that we bought for them. I love my cats, and I would do whatever it took to make sure they are happy and healthy so we don’t have a repeat of what happened to Darby.

Now, if only I would schedule a doctor’s appointment for myself…

This is my entry into the Medium Writer’s Challenge for the prompt “Death.” If you want to read more stories about my views on relationships, you may find them here.

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