My Beloved Dex

Dex is not coming out of it this time. I have to end it for her. There's no more joy for her, only pain and the struggle of it, the rasping breaths, the shaking from cold, the inability to eat.

She caught a cold again. I got her a convenia injection last Saturday, at the onset, hoping to relieve her of the suffering to come, with her kidney failure. She cannot withstand anything, with her kidney failure, certainly not an infection.

But the infection hit anyway, despite the shot, which had no affect this time, to halt the sinus infection. She cannot fight it with her kidney failure, no matter how much water I pump under her skin. Her kidneys have shrunk. They're hard and small, their ability to do their job--gone.

They now feel like Cattyhop's kidneys' felt, just before she died suddenly of a heart attack. The kidney's and the heart are like gas and a motor. One can't function without the other.

She has failed from last night to this morning.

I think to myself, "Should I give her another day, see if she rebounds." I don't like to play god with life and death. Then I think to myself, "She has had few good days since last January. What would I want, if I were her."

I don't want my death prolonged, stretching out over weeks or months of misery, drugs to control this or that symptom. I don't.

Give me an instant death but not one prolonged and drawn out, like waiting for a bus that doesn't come, in the pouring freezing rain, with nothing but dread for the next needle poke from the sad faced saviors.

Dex barely eats anymore. I have to give her fluids every day. She wobbles when she walks, like a drunk, and is sensitive to sound and light and touch. Now she cries if I pick her up, a hollow and hoarse moan.

I don't know how old Dex is. I believe she is 13. I have had Dex for 7 years, since summer 2004. How time flies. She was an adult when I rescued her. I rescued her from a young couple who took her along with 60 other cats from a woman who had lived in Corvallis with 120 cats, then was forced to move with them, or have them confiscated. She moved to Fall City and into a wolf rescue. That situation fell through and she was evicted and she agreed to give up all those cats to that young couple. However, they were not workers. The guy of the couple was a big time slacker, and although I was not involved in the rescue of those cats, I got involved afterwards, despite going through a major surgery at that time.

The woman with 120 cats had had Dex for awhile herself in Corvallis after rescuing her when she was abandoned in Dallas, she told me. The young couple who took the cats from her were not paying rent to their landlord, who was the brother of the Corvallis Animal control officer, who lived next door to the young couple way up in the woods.

I did not know they were freeloading. They borrowed cages and carriers from me that they then did not return and I finally found, along with others they had borrowed from other people, out dirty, in the grass, behind the house of one of their friends.

I helped them find another place to live in Eugene, but they left behind cats when they moved, including one of their own, who eventually was killed by predators. I searched the woods for that cat. They didn't.

I went up there, sure they had left other cats behind. They left chickens behind also. And tons of trash.

I just happened to arrive when they were there getting more things, including Dex, whom they had left behind, who had been locked inside the house without food or water. They had leash around her neck with a slip knot, she was struggling at the end of that leash. They'd pulled her out from under the hot water heater with it. She was choking. I said nothing, except "She's coming with me." They did not need to be treating her like a vicious wild animal. I put her in a carrier. I stopped by the neighbor's place, the animal control man. I wanted them arrested for animal abuse and abandonment. But all he did was make fun of my car.

Thereafter Dex was terrified of being closed in anywhere.

Still, with Dex's decline and condition, I question myself. The god complex. I don't want to wield it. The power of life or death.

I'll buy her the last needle poke she'll ever have to bear. I'll hold her while it's done. I'll let her go. It's her time.