A very thoughtful article about deciding how far to go with veterinary technology for an aging companion.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ed...age_and_moose/
Love, old age, and Moose
By Joan Wickersham
August 20, 2010
TO BEGIN with, Moose is a cat. That must be understood, or nothing can come of the story I am about to relate.
Given that he is a cat — an animal, a pet — I will add that he’s one of the great ones. He’s poised, smart, affectionate, handsome, and big. Or he used to be big. In his prime, he had a long-haired, plume-tailed, king-of-the-world majesty. He walked into the room and the floor shook. He liked his meals, and he made it very clear that he disagreed with us about how frequently they should occur. He lived with my mother for a number of years (OK — 10 years. We loaned him to her and she liked him too much to give him back) and the two of them got into arguments over what and how often he should be eating. He would sit in front of the refrigerator; she would say, “What? What are you implying?’’ and he would give her a look so withering, so critical, that she would check her watch and wonder if in fact he was right and it really was dinnertime.
(He’s a cat. An animal. A pet.)
But Moose isn’t big anymore. He’s 19. His long gray fur hides his frailty somewhat, but his body has started to have a caved-in look. He’s gotten pretty deaf and his kidneys have begun to fail. The reality is: he’s old. He’s not acutely sick, but he is dying, in the way that all living creatures eventually wear out.
One night a few weeks ago, Moose suddenly seemed unwell. His sides were heaving, he was having trouble breathing, and his front leg swelled up. When we tried to pick him up, he growled. Clearly he was in pain. So we found ourselves in the waiting room of the animal hospital, listening as the vet gave us a rundown. Moose was on painkillers and oxygen. They were running blood work. They wanted to do an X-ray of the swollen leg, and an electrocardiogram to check whether he’d had a heart attack, and a brain scan to see if he’d had a stroke.
I don’t know what I had expected. We’d brought him in for emergency veterinary care, and that’s what they were giving him. It was respectful, thorough, and technologically sophisticated, almost as if Moose were a person. But he wasn’t a person, I remembered, shaking my head when the vet asked whether to resuscitate him in the event of cardiac arrest. He was a cat, an animal, a pet. It was the vet’s job to offer us the full range of things they could possibly do for him. It was our job to sort through the options and say yes to only the ones that made sense, for this beloved pet who was reaching the end of his lifespan.
Veterinary ethics? I’ve never really thought about the issue, except to feel that it’s a pet owner’s responsibility to spare an animal unnecessary suffering.
When we were first married, my husband and I had a cat named Hannibal whom we adored irrationally and anthropomorphized shamelessly. He stopped eating, and the vet called us in the middle of surgery to say it was inoperable lymphoma and Hannibal would die within six months. What did we want to do?
Put him to sleep, we said instantly. For us, this had the mercy of being a clear-cut case. What was the point of stitching him up and putting him through a painful recovery, just so we could take our time saying goodbye to an animal who wouldn’t know the difference?
Moose’s situation is more confusing. I’m philosophically in favor of letting nature take its course, yet I’d never realized how many procedures and technologies would be available, or how hard it would be to decide when enough was enough. In the end we authorized only a moderate set of tests. When we picked him up the next morning, he was better.
So now he’s home again, sitting in front of the refrigerator looking old, battered, and reproachful. “Feed me,’’ he says, and I feed him — glad to do something for him, and knowing that someday soon there will be nothing I can do.
Joan Wickersham’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Her website is www.joanwickersham.com.
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