Our lemon kitty Marquis was diagnosed with chronic renal failure over a year ago and we've been able to treat him with daily subcutaneous fluid therapy to keep him hydrated. He was doing very well for over a year until about 4 weeks ago, when we came back from a wedding to find that he had crashed. We took him as soon as we could to the animal hospital and it was revealed that this kidney functions had deteriorated significantly. They placed him on IV fluids for several days, but unfortunately that had no effect on his condition. Rather than keep him alone in a cage, we brought him home, but sadly he has gotten worse over the last several weeks.
He has lost a lot of weight and is only 4 lbs after being over 10 lbs a month ago. His ribcage shows through his fur and the rest of his body is sunken in. He's not really not eating anything and we've tried dozens of different foods, including his old favorites. We even tried giving him some rotisserie chicken, which he used to follow us around the world for. His nose is brown, peeling, and crusty. His fur is not growing back from where the doctor shaved him to put the IV in and the underlying skin is patchy and brown. He's finding new places to hide and he doesn't have the energy to jump up to his old favorite places. And he smells bad, particularly from his mouth, but even from the rest of his body as toxins have been accumulating without being cleared by the kidneys.
We've been trying to fight this with almost an entire pharmacy's worth of medicines. We've increased his sub-q fluid intake to 120 mL a day. We've also been giving him Prednisone daily, Cobalamin injections weekly, and lately Reglan and Pepcid to try and control any nausea and get him to eat. At a checkup last week, his numbers haven't changed but his phosphorus levels are now high, so we've been treating him with aluminum hydroxide binder. Nothing has really worked at all and his condition has just gotten worse. We've tried assisted feeding (syringing some liquid food into his mouth) and it was a disaster---he was fighting and clawing and the syringe clogged and spurted food everywhere.
The whole ordeal has been traumatizing to us and him---every morning and night, we have to fight him to medicate him and now he runs away from us to hide when he used to run to us. He can barely move now and walks with a limp and spends most of his time lying down. This is the first time that anyone or anything close to me has been dying.
How much is too much? How do you know when is the end? His quality of life has decreased so much that we're not sure if there's anything we can do to bring him back or if it would even be worth it. It's been a really intense emotional roller coaster ride---one morning, he'll eat a bit of food and we'll get our hopes up but then the next day he's no longer eating and acting worse. But this last week has been all downhill. It's really hard to know when to end his suffering---sometimes his eyes are kind of unfocused, but most of the time I can see in his eyes that he's still there. How long do you wait?
Tonight, we reached the point where he was too weak to make it to his litter box and he ended up lying in a pool of urine. We placed him in his bed and he collapsed and lay on his side. We just gently held him, but he still had enough energy to rub his face against our hands. He barely had enough energy to stand, but he used his last reserve of energy to keep rubbing his face on us and weakly purr. We stayed with him for a while until it looked like he was relaxed, but when we stood up, he lifted up his head and stared at us with wide eyes. He didn't want us to leave him and kept looking at us until we came back and held him. His eyes closed in peace. We stayed with him until he fell asleep.
This is likely the end. We just want him to be released from his suffering. He's been fighting to stay for our sake, but I think he knows that we've made peace with it. He doesn't have to fight any longer.
My wife likes to say that I'm usually very rational and don't show my emotions very often, sometimes resulting in people thinking that I'm cold or flat. I've wondered this about myself as well. From early on, I've learned to try and keep an even keel, sometimes to the extent that I wonder if I really am just not as emotional as other people. Now I know that's not true.
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