Today we had to take our cat in to have him put to sleep. Our poor, poor, Manny. He was recently diagnosed with FIP, a rare and fatal cat disease.
This is the shitty part of owning a pet.
We adopted him in September while I had a long break from work for labor day. We had been talking for months about how excited we were to get a pet, a cat specifically, for us and for Julian. We went to three different cat adoption sites and finally found Manny. We loved his big hands (he's a polydactyl) and his fearlessness around our then 19-month-old. So we invited him to live with our family, he accepted, and he came home with us. We played together, we gave him treats, we tried to teach him a few tricks (and failed miserably, cats are stubborn). Julian especially loved playing with him and his toys. Then a couple months after we had brought him home he started acting sick, he wasn't using his litter box, he had constant diarrhea (sorry), so I brought him to the vet. He was sent home with some antibiotics, special food to make his tummy better and some worm treatment. With the medicine his diarrhea got better, and he seemed to become healther. Then about two weeks ago he just sort of stopped eating as much, to basically not eating at all. We were worried, he hadn't gained any weight since we brought him home (as a five month old kitten he should've been growing), he didn't seem to be thriving, and he had become lethargic, not actively playing with us as he had before. Ben and I were concerned that something was seriously wrong. We brought him to the vet, where he had some bloodwork done and when it came back he was diagnosed with FIP, which stands for feline infectious peritonitis. It is an incurable disease that cats develop which almost always results in death. We chose to have him put to sleep instead of letting him live his final days at home because we could see that he was suffering so much, he was so weak, it was just too selfish and too unfair to see him live like that.
What have we told Jules? He's only two so he has no idea what the concept of death is and I'm not about to open up that can of worms with a two year old. Basically we just plan on telling him that Manny had to go live somewhere else, more specifically cat-heaven (you know, heaven for cats, or do all animals and people go to the same heaven?).
Man, death sucks.
