slowly she turned

Diego left this world about three weeks ago.

Diego and Pablocito came to us as fosters suddenly after we visited PetSmart just before they closed on August 20, 2013. They had just been brought in from the animal shelter and never even made it to the cage in the adoption room. We brought them both home that night in the carrier, when they immediately started destroying everything!

We immediately had to take them in for medical care, since they both had ringworm and conjunctivitis, plus Diego was put on antibiotics. So it was a challenge from the start, especially dealing with the shelter. We shut them away from the other cats and bathed them every day. Finally, with the vet’s help, the shelter let us go ahead and adopt them so we could provide the medical help that the shelter wouldn’t offer. In fact, the shelter told us that if we brought them back to their clinic again they would euthanize them.

When you nurse kittens like this, they really dig deep into your heart.

Not that it was hard to love Diego – he charmed everyone who met him. He was a handsome fella and he knew it.

His first foster parents named him Winnie. He was found in a ditch when he was about one week old. Sandy wanted to name him Wolf. I finally talked Sandy into naming him Diego, after Diego Rivera. (He turned out to be a chonk, like Rivera!) I just like names that end in “O”. Sandy called them Trouble One and Trouble Two (Diego was #2) and I often called him Chunkybutt and Stinkybutt for an unfortunate reason – sometimes I had to run him out of the room because his stank could have been used as a weapon of mass destruction.

His favorite place was on the front porch. My bed was absolutely his territory and if he caught Pablocito on it, usually within five minutes there would be a fight if Pablocito didn’t run first. He jumped up and meowed when Sandy walked into the room and then would follow him to the sofa or the man cave.

It has been an awful time of loss for both Sandy and me, but Diego stopped eating after a little over a week past his cancer diagnosis on June 10, and we made the decision to let him go on June 24. It was especially hard, not only because he didn’t act sick, but because he was a cuddly lovey bear who spent roughly equal amounts of time with both of us. We had to let him go because the cancer in his throat spread quickly and he could not eat and could barely drink.

I try to think of some of the lucky things, such as that when I left on my trip to the United Kingdom, he was being treated for an infection and for asthma. I was anxious enough about leaving him, but if this had happened before or during my trip, it would have been utterly ruined. When I returned, I saw that his lump had gotten bigger, but the vet had told me that they might have to try several different antibiotics before finding one that would work. Being told that he had inoperable cancer was a real shock for both of us, and then being told that he wouldn’t last the summer, but we thought we had more than a couple of weeks!

The other lucky thing, and this is the most important one, is that he did not seem to suffer much. He would have if we had hung onto him, and that would have been wrong. I wish that we had the option for humane euthanasia. After watching loved ones suffer, I’ve considered moving to a place where it is legal.

Pablocito (named after Picasso) seems to be doing okay. This is the first time in our lives that we’ve had only one cat. Diego bullied Pablocito so he might be happier. He is certainly getting an enormous amount of attention. We had planned to go to the lake this weekend, but canceled, partially because we couldn’t bear to leave him alone just yet.

Now that I’ve made myself write this post, I hope that I can move on a little more easily and write about some happier subjects. I felt like this and the trip to the UK had to be addressed before I could write about anything else.