Once again personal experience has provided fodder for my column. This time it began with a frantic 2AM call and culminated in the death of my neighbor’s cat an hour later, doubly tragic as the cat had been a former foster kitten of mine.

Cats and dogs hide illness and pain amazingly well, sometimes until it is too late when the caregiver suspects something is wrong. By then, at best it will be a costly vet visit for diagnostic tests, possible surgery, meds and hospitalization, but your pet will live. At worst, you may not have the chance to say goodbye to your beloved pet, just as it happened that terrible night.

That evening around 8:00 I was trapping when my phone rang.

“There’s something wrong with Glinda. When I got home I found her lying on my bed in a puddle of urine and there might be something wrong with her back legs as she flops over when I pick her up,” my neighbor told me

She went on to say that the cat had been fine in the morning when they ate breakfast together before work.

I am not a veterinarian but I’m often asked for advice anyway, so I stopped by the house on my way home from trapping. My neighbor and I both agreed the cat should be seen, but it was 8:30PM and her vet was obviously not open. Should Glinda be taken to the pet ER…? Her pet did not appear to be at death’s door and she did walk for us, so my friend made the fateful decision to wait until morning. We carefully moved Glinda into a quiet bathroom for the night.

At 2AM the phone jerked me awake with hysterics on the other end. Poor Glinda was now in dire straits. There was no longer a question about driving to Arroyo Grande as we carefully put the cat on a towel and slid her into a crate.

During the trip I would occasionally slip my fingers into the carrier to gently stroke Glinda’s head. Right before the exit, she cried out and once again I reached in to comfort her. Suddenly she bit me hard, to the bone, in reaction to the extreme pain she was in.

Screeching to a halt in front of the ER, we grabbed the carrier and rushed into the building. Two minutes later the veterinarian came out to inform my friend her “cat didn’t make it.” In tears and with (my) still bleeding finger, we said our goodbyes to poor Glinda as she lay stretched out on her towel, finally free from pain. If only we hadn’t waited….

The vet surmised that it was feline cardiomyopathy, the major cause of heart failure in young and middle-aged cats. (Glinda was only three-and-a-half.) Symptoms can come on suddenly, sometimes within hours as in this case. After hearing the symptoms from a few hours earlier, the vet added that a possible blood clot may also have been involved. This, she said, would have accounted for the pain. We were devastated to know her had suffered for hours.

In sad retrospect I see several things I would do over, the first one being to say, “Hang the cost, call the vet now!” This was a really difficult situation considering the hour and the fragile financial state of my neighbor, and ultimately it was her decision to wait until morning. Still I feel guilty that I did not push for immediate action.

The second lesson I learned was to be very careful when touching an animal in pain, even one you know well as they may lash out and bite or scratch you as Glinda did in this case. Do not be fooled by a purring cat as that can be a sign of stress and/or pain. Better to swaddle your cat in a towel if it is injured or ill to protect you both on the way to the vet.

As a result of said bite, Glinda’s cremation had to be delayed until I had seen my own doctor. Since the cat was an indoor-only kitty and had been adopted at eight weeks of age, she had not been vaccinated for Rabies which is done at four months, so my physician had to approve the decision not to do a necropsy of the cat’s brain. As a precaution, I was put on a two-week course of antibiotics to ward against cat-scratch fever, a subject I wrote about several years ago. (Enter a search on our website under the Articles tab for “Cat-Scratch Fever—is it real?”)

Another case of sudden pet death touched me shortly before poor Glinda’s passing. That friend lost her dog to an aggressive form of cancer. Parker had been in my home a week before and had shown no signs of illness; days later he was gone.

Please, don’t be too busy to stay closely attuned to your pets. Nature’s survival of the fittest is so ingrained in our animals that they mask symptoms by instinct. If you think your furry companion is in need of vet care, please to not delay seeking help. Better to be wrong and out a few bucks than lose a beloved family member.