Cyclops didn't make it

With all the running around yesterday with Ivan, I had postponed Cyclops' neuter/testing appointment which was to be today. But last night when I went into see him, for the first time he hadn't finished his wet food with his Clavamox, and any time he crouched down, he breathed more heavily. This would indicate chest congestion and likely pneumonia, which isn't good. It's really not good.

If he was moving from an upper respiratory to a lower respiratory infection after being on antibiotics for five days of "doing OK", then likely whatever he had wasn't susceptible to Clavamox. I have a few Baytril tablets specifically in our protocol for a situation like this, and I ground one up in baby food and gave it to him by a syringe. He was pretty tolerant of this for a "feral" and I wondered if were because he was so ill or because he was actually tame.

There was also the concern about rabies. We had had a rabid fox in the neighborhood just a few weeks before. Changes in personality, and also this type of lethargy, can be due to rabies. I wasn't seeing neurological signs, but rabies can take so many forms. Pneumonia seemed the likely cause, but I didn't want to be stupid, either. If he died in my arms here, he was going to have to be tested for rabies.

I wiped out his eyes...no problem. And I began to pet him. He was OK with that, but it caused him to crouch down, which made breathing harder, so I sat him up and began scritching under his chin and jowls. He had little scabs everywhere that were mostly healed, and I'm sure they itched something fierce.

And he began to purr. It was hard to tell the purr amid all the rasping, but it was unmistakably a purr.

I folded up a towel and laid it over the end of his bed (which was a large cat litter pan with a towel in it) and set him in there with his front legs over the edge. This kept him off his chest.

When I came back out later it seemed like he was breathing a bit more easily, and purred again as I scritched him. I decided he had to go to the vet in the morning even if I had cancelled his appointment. Pneumonia is a serious issue. It can kill kittens in a matter of hours. And Cy had been through a lot.

And he was still sitting with his paws over the edge of the bed in the morning, watching me. His breathing was still labored, but I wanted to believe it wasn't as bad as the night before. Certainly he was no worse, except he was more dehydrated. Perhaps the Baytril was having an effect. I stole Mark's car by driving Mark into work, and went straight to the vet without an appointment. They let me right in.

His temp was 103, which originally pleased me (a cat's normal temp is 100-101, so 103 is bad but not too bad). But the vet pointed out to me that dehydration suppresses a high temp and once they gave him fluids his temp might spike higher. He was very congested, but she said "Yes, it's bad, but let's not give up on him yet." They were clearly suckers for an old fighting tom, too. She ran him through some balance and movement tests to do a quick check for neurological issues (rabies). He was fine in that regard. They gave him Baytril injectible, and some fluids, and then we realized we should have combo tested him BEFORE starting all this treatment.

All of his canine teeth were broken off. He was missing a toe (long healed), and of course an eye (long gone). He had tiny scabs under his fur from head to toe, ear mites, and the pneumonia, and some sort of unknown orange stuff stuck to his fur.

And then he tested positive for FIV.

That changed everything.

It seemed then that he had probably gone into pneumonia because his FIV-striken immune system could not fight off the respiratory infection, and this tilted the liklihood of survival heavily against him. And with FIV, even if he somehow managed to pull off a now-unlikely miracle, he could not go back to his colony-mates (all of whom thus far are FeLV/FIV negative).

So we decided to put him down. And that was difficult, since we had all been in a "hey, maybe he's not quite over the edge yet" mood just a moment before. He got some more petting, and didn't seemed frightened at all.

So Cyclops, rest in peace, guy. It sure would have been nice to see you sitting lean and glossy with your spayed lady friends in the sun up on the Hill with your one gold eye. But there is nothing worse than watching a scared cat rattle away the last days of his life in a cage, hooked up to an IV, fighting to breathe.

I came home and left a message on Valarie and Craig's voice mail, which is a bad way to let someone know about their back-porch feline visitor, but I didn't want them to read it here first.

At least he got one last chance to purr.