This is part four of a running tribute, which began more happily with this post.  I hope it lends a personal touch to our current theme of pet grief ...

When Bubba’s complications began early in the Fall, they could hardly have come at a more unstable time for us in general.  Already adjusting to a much-disrupted way of life with our first newborn in the house, Cheryl also wasn’t able to find another teaching job after being laid off earlier in the year due to massive budget cutbacks.  Instead of me staying home with the baby as we’d planned, and hoping to eke out a part-time financial contribution through the tenuous prospect of raising funding for not one sparrow, I now had to return unexpectedly to the grind of substitute teaching. 

It’s an often draining experience working with kids even on a good day, and some days are far from good as a substitute.  To boot, I found myself in a longterm assignment at the middle school, which started much earlier (I’m a night owl and don’t function well early in the morning) and kept me on my feet teaching mostly PE to kids ranging from motivated to hazardously ADHD.  I was grateful for the job, but it was sucking every ounce of life out of me. 

Towards the end of my first week back, I woke up one morning to find Bubba licking his groin area and ‘little Bubba’ persistently, and groaning whenever I touched his back or stomach.  I was concerned, but one of our other cats (Baby) had been through a urinal infection of her own and quickly recovered through a dose of antibiotics, so I wasn’t too worried about him (not yet realizing how urinary tract disease impacts males much more severely).  When I got home, seriously needing a nap, Bubba was much more relaxed.  I still wanted to bring him in to the vet, though, and figured he was overdue for a checkup and shots anyway. 

As infinitely laidback as Bubba was, he absolutely hated being crated and transported for whatever reason, and whined prolifically in the car.  I wondered if he was overstimulated like many indoor cats get when they're brought outside, or if perhaps he remembered an earlier occasion in his life when he was crated and left at a shelter.  Apparently Bubba’s hatred of the experience had only intensified, because not only did he cry all the way out to the car and most of the way to the vet, but we’d driven only a few miles before he peed all over the crate and found himself sloshing around in it.  And a few minutes later he pooped in the back of it.  The stench was terrible, but I felt even more awful for Bubba being trapped in his own waste, and was almost as stressed out as he was when we got to the vet.

After getting cleaned up (thankfully), the normally gregarious Bubba tried to hide himself under my chair in the examination room and lick himself dry.  The vet told me his symptoms pointed quite possibly to a urinary tract infection, but the fact that he seemed more comfortable and peed on the way over was a good sign.  He might block again, or he might be fine, she said.  I wanted to believe the latter, knowing we had hardly any money or energy to treat a serious problem.  She gave him a quick checkup and his regular shots, and told me to keep an eye on him. 

But after the weekend, Bubba was demonstrating the same compulsive licking again.  A bit more worried this time, I scheduled another appointment for him after school, this time at a vet across the street from our apartment complex.  I wasn’t about to put him, or me, through the trauma of an extended car ride again.  Amazingly, once he was at the clinic Bubba managed to unstop himself again, and a vet tech showed me what looked like a rice pellets in their special litter box.  Apparently, we were lucky to have been saved the expense of a costly surgery, and the vet sent us home with three different meds to try to keep him from blocking again.

The meds were to be taken orally, and the largest dose was virtually impossible to give Bubba.  I could manage to shoot the smaller doses into his mouth after some struggle and with some leakage, but with the larger vial  he swung his head violently and clamped his jaws shut all the more, scraping and kicking and clawing in the process.  We tried everything: wrapping him in a towel, pinning him down on a counter, putting the medicine in yogurt or chicken baby food.  But a few days later, with much medicine wasted in a lost effort and my arms raked with scratches, I gave up.  Worse, Bubba’s symptoms were returning yet again, and I knew he wasn’t peeing.  Sometimes I’d watch him strain for minutes on end over the litter box, and nothing came out.  

Back we went to the vet.  I was beyond frustrated with failing miserably to give the medication he needed, while watching him continue to struggle to relieve himself.  I’d been told urinary problems were a serious issue for any cat, and for males all the more because their tracts are even narrower than females’.  Blockages could even lead to death in a very short amount of time if untreated (I very much recommend familiarizing yourself with the symptoms and related advice).  The vet told me we had no choice this time but to proceed with a catheterization surgery to remove the obstruction and clean out the bladder.  It was going to be costly, around $500, and we didn’t have a third of that to spare in our bank account or credit, even temporarily.  I was trying to keep myself together, but the strain was throbbing its way to the surface in every part of me.

I didn’t know what was going on, why we’d spent over $200 already on checkups and meds that didn’t work, or why all this was happening now in an already unbearably stressful season.  My exhaustion from teaching mixed with this intense frustration and anxiety, and was only magnified by knowing the alternative to surgery was to continue to watch Bubba suffer agonizingly to the point of death, or put him down.  I knew neither Cheryl or I could ever bear to keep him suffering like this, or put him down without doing all we could to save him.  The grief and regret would be unbearable, even more so right at this moment in our lives.  And just as importantly, we simply couldn’t justify giving up on a precious life, regardless of whether I had tied myself the larger cause of Luke 12:6 or not.

I told most of this to the vet and her tech in the examining room, explaining the background of our economic situation with forced sobriety, but the underlying tension was readily apparent in my demeanor.  I felt incredibly vulnerable and helpless, and ashamed that it showed so much, even more so when I realized my pleas were pointless.  Stoically, she said they couldn’t give us any kind of follow-up discount or even allow for a payment plan, as the clinic had been burned too many times before.  I wanted to scream, but instead asked for some time to collect my thoughts and make a call.  Even before they left the room I knew I had no alternative but to beg Cheryl to ask her parents for a loan, even though they (like my own parents) had already given above and beyond to us in recent months.

It was a frantic and humiliating moment, even though I didn’t have to make the call myself and knew in my heart Cheryl's parents would respond sympathetically, cat lovers as they are and big fans of Bubba.  Still, how could I be 30 with a young family and find myself in this dire a predicament, let alone haul my in-laws into it?  How could God let this happen, after we’d been through so much desperation and accrued so much need already?  And, to be honest, the irony of knowing I had invested so much of myself into an effort such as not one sparrow and still was unable to pay for my own cats’ basic vet bills, let alone urgently needed surgery, only haunted me more.   

(one last post to come ...)