Fridays aren’t supposed to suck …

… but then again, most Fridays don’t involve what I went through today.

I got my cat, Orion, in October of 1999, adopted from an SPCA when he was 9 weeks old … today I had to put him down.

I don’t know what happened to him, although we suspect it may have been a lodged stone … Monday, he was fine, and seemed to be perfectly healthy … I bathed him, brushed him … he was eating, drinking, bugging me, chasing our other cats … nothing abnormal … by Wednesday, he seemed like he was a bit stiff and sore, and was making constant trips to the litter. By mid-Thursday, we found he was urinating blood.

By this morning, he was so weak he could barely lift his head, and his breathing was labored, even though he had no signs of bloating and his nose was still cold. He’d stopped eating and drinking entirely, and moving him caused him enough pain to make him cry … abnormal, as Orion barely ever made a sound. Without having a vet in our small town, my only options were to either let him suffer, or put him down myself, putting him to sleep with two Tylenol 3’s dissolved in a small amount of water. I loved him far too much to let him suffer.

He’s buried beneath our rose bushes, where he used to lay to get out of the sun whenever we let him go outside on his leash. It eases my mind a bit to know he went peacefully, that the pain killers took the pain away before he passed, but it’s hard knowing that the adorable, stubborn little furball that once could fit in the palm of my hand and forced me to let him sleep on my chest rather than in a box is gone … morning will be hard too, waking up for the first morning in seven years without him curled up less than 10 feet from me … I know he’s not hurting now, and that he went peacefully … I just find it hard to believe that my mighty hunter is gone …