It all started one day when I was going through my normal morning routine with my 2-year-old. I am a stay-at-home mom and I had just served my son his breakfast. I then went to get some clothes out of the dryer, which is in a room just past my kitchen. As I was starting to pull clothes out of the dryer, I heard this frantic, high pitched, crying-type meow. At first, I thought that it was one of my two cats had gotten hurt. I started to look for my cats, only to realize that this loud meowing was coming from outside. I opened my back door to see this poor, skinny little kitten just meowing away and shaking furiously. She was huddled up as close as she could get to my back door and sitting in the snow. As soon as I spoke to her, she came running up to me. I don’t know how long she had been out there, but she was shaking cold, so skinny, and very hungry.
I knew almost immediately that there was something wrong with this little kitten, but I did not have the heart to throw her back outside. I called my husband at work and told him about what happened and that I brought her inside. I asked him to ask around and see if anyone wanted her and I did the same. He reassured me that I had done the right thing by bringing her in. We had a couple of people that “almost” got her, but within a few days, we decided to keep her and named her “Gracie” since that is my sister-in-law’s nickname and we found the kitten on her birthday.
As soon as I realized we were going to keep her, I made her an appointment with our veterinarian. She was emaciated, her eyes were runny, she sneezed a lot, and every time she ate, she had diarrhea. She even had a couple of accidents, where she just suddenly had a bowel movement, even on our laps. I had a gut feeling that something was seriously wrong with her and it told me not to give her away, or get too attached.
At the vet’s office, they told me that she was severely underweight and had a fever. They estimated that she was 14 weeks old, but weighed just over half of what she should. They then took her to draw a blood sample to test for feline leukemia and another common feline disease. When they brought her back, they told me that the test should take about ten minutes.
My heart sank about five minutes in when the vet came back, test in hand. I knew something was bad just from the vet’s face, and because it hadn’t been that long and she brought the test in with her. She showed me the test and that it was positive for feline leukemia, an illness that most indoor cats, including my own, have not been vaccinated against.
I felt horribly guilty for bringing in a stray, but the vet agreed with my theory that she would not have made it much longer out there by herself. The unfortunate thing is that I have now exposed my healthy cats, that my children are very attached to, to a very serious, and maybe even deadly virus.
The vet told me that it wasn’t necessarily a death sentence and told me that I could get my other two cats vaccinated, keeping the kitten separated in the garage for a week to ten days while my cats built up immunity. She said that some cats live for two weeks, others live a full lifetime. She told me that, rarely, some cats even test negative later in life. I knew what the best thing for my family was.
I left the vet’s office, almost in tears, and got into the car where my husband was waiting. I started to tell him what the vet had said and I just broke down and cried. I knew what we had to do. I finally got it all out and explained it to my husband, who said out loud exactly what I was thinking-we had to put her down. We could plainly see how sick she was and we all were already really attached to her, even though we didn’t have her much more than a week. We knew that the write thing was that we had given her a good home for a short time and showed her that people can love, but we couldn’t let her suffer any longer than she already had. We also knew that, as time went on, our children would get even more attached than they already were.
We said our last goodbyes and my husband drove Gracie back to the vet, for the last time. I cried nearly that whole day. The hardest part was when my 6-year-old son came up to me that night and said how much he missed Gracie. He told me that he wasn’t crying, but whenever he thought about her that his eyes would water. I told him that it’s just his way of being sad for losing our kitten, and that it’s completely OK and normal to cry when you are sad.
I try to find something positive out of every situation that I encounter, but this one was an especially hard situation to find something good that came out of it. I understand that Gracie is now in heaven, and that she is no longer sick, hungry or cold. She was and will be grateful for the kindness that we showed her.
The most positive and longest lasting outcome from this particularly sad situation will always be the fact that it opened up communication for my son. It allowed him to express himself and was actually an excellent opportunity for my husband and I to help guide him through the grieving process. This may help him learn how to cope with future situations in which he has to grieve. I’m not saying that seeing my son upset is good at all, but the learning opportunity is good.
I am still heart-broken and I still feel somewhat guilty for bringing in a stray, but if I could go back in time, I think that the only thing that I would change is keeping the cats more separated. I much prefer an animal to be humanely euthanized, over being slowly starved or dying from hypothermia. I will always miss my kitten, but I think that we made the right decision.