The Truth

I haven’t blogged in two months. What an awful supreme ruler I am, Minion Horde! You must be bummed. You must be annoyed. You must wonder why. The answer, I’m afraid, isn’t so simple. But as I’ve been telling you all for years now, Auntie Heather believes in honesty. So I’ll just tell you the truth, and then I’ll be a better Auntie about keeping you better informed about my goings-on.

The last time I blogged, it was around Halloween. I had just experienced a crazy month of promotion and touring and frankly, Auntie Heather just wanted to crawl inside her cave and pretend the world didn’t exist for a while. I’ve had a very stressful year, and I was looking forward to diving into some writing and letting the real world fall away for a while. I was looking forward to living in the pretend. And I did, for a bit. That is, until the real world grabbed me by the back of the neck and dragged me back into the harsh light of day last week.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know that Auntie Heather is a self-professed crazy cat lady. I love kittehs. They are fuzzy lil people – better than most of the humans that I know. I consider my kittehs to be my furry children, and it’s an ongoing joke in my family that I love the kittehs more than I love my human kids (and Jacob and Alexandria get that…I suspect because they love the kittehs more than their parents). I realize that those who aren’t animal people (or cat people in particular) might not understand this, and I’m okay with that. But I love my kittehs…and so last week was a very difficult time for me (it still is, and I suspect it will be for a long time).

This…is Loki.

Loki is a fan of cuddling, purrs on demand, and has the most cotton-like fur that I’ve ever had the pleasure of stroking. Loki’s favorite thing in the world to do is chew on all things crunchy, so we’ve kept him well stocked with turkey-flavored treats and crinkle balls. He often will sit and cock his head to the side, as if to say, “Whatcha doin’?” His favorite place to lay in my office is on the paper shredder by the window, where he can watch the birds on the feeder outside. He is my youngest kitteh, my baby…and there’s something wrong with the tense I’ve used in this paragraph.

Because we lost Loki’s young life this past Friday. I should be referring to Loki in the past tense. But it’s hard. Because he was just here. He was just cuddling with me on the couch. He was just…here.

Until he wasn’t.

This past Monday, we’d gone through our regular morning routine (which, when you are a kitteh in the Brewer Clan household, consists of wake mommy up, get treats, play with feather thing, then let mommy go to work) and I retired to my office to get some work done on the third Slayer Chronicles book. The writing was going really well, and I was wearing my Beats, jamming out to Green Day’s “Stray Heart”. My son, Jacob, tapped my shoulder (because when the Beats are on, I can’t hear anything that’s going on outside of the music) and said that my husband, Paul, was calling me. I found Paul in the kitchen with Loki, who was really favoring his right front paw. He tried to walk, but started meowing louder and louder, as if he was in a lot of pain. His paw was just dangling there, so we called our vet right away and asked to be seen. Within twenty minutes, Loki was given pain meds and X-rays were taken. No breaks were detected at all, and we examined the X-rays with our vet. Our vet (who’s amazing, by the way) suspected nerve issues at first, and told us that Loki seemed to not be able to feel his paw at all, but was having pain in the rest of his legs. So he prescribed a pain med and Prednisone. He said that in a day or two, we should see improvement (if it was a nerve issue). If not, we should get Loki in for an MRI. We nervously took Loki home and, apart from being a little out of it from the pain meds and learning quickly to get around on three legs, he seemed to be feeling back to himself.

That is, until Wednesday. I’d just given Loki his pain meds while he was lying in our dining room, and I stopped in my office for a second before crossing through the foyer (all right next to each other). By the time I reached the foyer (maybe ten minutes after I’d given him the pain meds), Loki was laying in the foyer, his back legs twitching. I joked with him, asking if he had restless leg syndrome, like mommy or something. But shortly after I moved into the next room (our living room) he started yowling. I asked my husband to bring him into the living room, so we could keep an eye on him (his brother, Fang, had been biting the back of his next since Monday – he thought he was helping Loki, but Loki just didn’t want to be touched).

Paul brought Loki in and within minutes, his back legs were jerking weirdly. He started yowling horribly, his eyes wide, as if he were in intense pain, despite the meds he was on. Then he tried to stand and couldn’t. His back legs wouldn’t work at all, and he seemed terrified. All of this took just under twenty minutes. We called the vet, who arranged for us to take Loki to the best animal hospital in our area (he spoke to a trusted colleague of his there, who said Loki was probably dealing with a blood clot), and we rushed him in. The staff was on alert for our arrival and rushed Loki to a room right away. They immediately started stepping him up on IV pain meds and administered Heparin (a blood thinner, to help break up the clot). The vet there explained to us what saddle thrombus is (feel free to Google it), and told us the cardiologist would be in to examine Loki the moment she finished in surgery. Later that night, the vet called to tell us that the cardiologist examined Loki and found no heart issues at all and that this was very likely saddle thrombus. He said they’d continue the Heparin and pain meds until the next morning, when they could perform an ultrasound to determine where the clot is located and how big it was.

After a loooong night and a looooonger morning, we heard back that they performed an ultrasound and located a clot of “sludge-like consistency” in the aorta, at the Y-section near the back legs. The vet said that Loki was alert and seemed to have his pain managed, and gave us a 50/50 chance of survival. We called our vet (who is wonderful and really loves our kitteh babies), and he called the hospital vet to discuss Loki’s case. Our regular vet told us that with Loki’s young age, how strong he was, and how quickly we got him medical attention, he felt we have a bit better a chance than 50/50. But they both said that only time would tell.

And it did tell. But not what we were hoping it would.

Loki started having breathing issues, and was placed back in the incubator with oxygen. But he wasn’t there for long. Loki died. And to be honest, I’m broken because of it.

People brush off the death of a pet like it’s nothing. But it’s something. It’s huge. And it’s so, so painful to endure. I’m a sensitive person anyway, but losing someone that I love is deeply troubling. But each and every word of encouragement and sympathy that I’ve received has been amazing and are greatly appreciated.

Loki was a sweet boy, just a year and a half old. And I miss him.

So do my other kittehs, Amenti and Fang. So do my husband, my kids. It’s been a traumatic, unexpected loss. But we’re dealing with it.

It’s also been the apex of my awful 2012. I’m hoping 2013 will be better.

So anyway…that’s the truth.