Caturday: Making Life-and-Death Decisions for Furry Family Members
Happy Cat with his best pal, CB Leaver When you have a family of cats, you end up facing some of the same difficult decisions that human families face, the most difficult among these being end-of-life issues. A couple of months ago, Happy Cat changed overnight from happy to sad. One day he was his affectionate self, nurturing the other cats; the next day, he was walking in circles, stumbling into his food bowl, and acting confused--and was clearly blind. After local vets ruled out physiological reasons for the behavior and the blindness, we took him to a neurology center for an MRI. He has a brain tumor, a melangioma. Options we were given included very expensive surgery ($15K), radiology (nearly as expensive and would require frequent out of town trips), or medicine (that would not cure or even put him into remission but would make him more comfortable). Beyond the expense of the surgery, there was a bigger picture. Happy Cat is a geriatric cat, a street rescue between the ...