Attention comrades of the #wlf
and all anipals. It is with the leakiest eyes that I must tell you that our
sweet Smitty Kitty (@IAmSmittyKitty) has gone over the rainbow bridge. If you
are reading this, Smitty was a pal to you, and this must be a shock. It all
seems very sudden; hopefully this blog post will make things more clear. If you
tweeted with Smitty, you know he was all heart. This was true in more ways than
one.
At the beginning of May of 2013, Smitty developed a little
cough. We were concerned that he may have had a chest cold or allergies so we
took him to our regular vet for a check up and chest x-ray. The x-ray revealed
that Smitty actually suffered from cardiomyopathy,
a heart condition that results in an enlarged heart. It’s a genetic condition
that can strike a cat at any age from 3 months to 10 years, although it is far
more common in older cats. Smitty had just turned two. Our vet referred us to
the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of
Veterinary Medicine in Blacksburg, Virginia, or as we call it around here,
the Vet Med College. We are blessed to live in the area; many devoted anipal staff
drive for hours to bring their pets here.
An echocardiogram confirmed what the chest x-ray showed.
Smitty’s heart had an advanced case of heart disease. The entire left side of his
heart wasn’t working at all. Quantity of life was no longer an option. Quality
of life was all we could shoot for. The note they sent us home with concluded
that Smitty could die at any moment. Needless to say, it was a very dark day.
Please forgive us if we decided not to tell the pals on
Twitter what was going on. Smitty didn’t realize he was sick, you see. We
didn’t have the heart to tell him. We just let him be sweet, happy, silly
Smitty.
Smitty was born to a mama cat that was either feral or homeless.
Blacksburg, Virginia is a college town, and as such, it has a problem with irresponsible
college students who adopt cats that they cannot afford to spay or neuter and
then graduate or return home for the summer and abandon their “college” pet.
Smitty’s mama cat taught him how to eat from a trash dumpster, weaned him, and
then shunned him at around 12 weeks old. Smitty, ever a willful lad, decided he
didn’t like to be alone, so he sat beside the dumpster mewing loudly for days
until the girlfriend of the new tenant whose bedroom window was below the
dumpster scooped him up and brought him in. (Thanks to Smitty’s song, they had
not slept for two nights.) The boyfriend’s apartment did not allow pets, so she
took the kitten to her apartment, snapped some adorable pictures of the little
guy, and posted them on Facebook: Kitten Needs a Home.
That’s how we met Smitty. His rescuer was a friend of a
friend, and that friend shared the photos on her Facebook timeline. I saw them there, and I knew at first sight that
I had to play with the kitten. Had. To. I also knew what that meant, so I asked
my husband if I could have him. We have an older cat, and I felt a companion
kitten would put a bit more spring in her step. Plus, I had to play with the
kitten. Had. To.
 |
| Admit it! You would have to play with this kitten too. Have. To. |
My husband made me promise to take him straight to the vet
for shots and a checkup, which I did. In addition to ear mites, Smitty had bad
diarrhea, not uncommon, but in his case it was a serious overrun of Clostridium Difficile. The “C-Diff”
bacteria can be found in rotten meat and rotten vegetable matter, the sort you
would find at the bottom of a trash dumpster. He passed his feline leukemia
test though (after a tense 30 minutes...I was already smitten with Smitty, but
a positive test result would have ended his life that day). We put him on
antibiotics to straighten out the tummy troubles and little Smitty thrived.
His tummy trouble did not immediately stop, though. The
weeks of eating dumpster trash had wrecked his GI tract, and he had chronic
IBS. We put him on a daily antibiotic. This need for a once-a-day pill resulted
in Smitty, at a young age, becoming comfortable with being handled and pilled. His
heart condition required more pills to be given, every 12 hours, and this
allowed us to keep him medicated and comfortable for much longer than might be
expected.
He took a pill to reduce his blood pressure, giving his
half-heart a break from having to work so hard. And he took two doses of a
diuretic, furosemide, every day, to relieve the build-up of fluid from around
his not-so-spunky heart. The coughing stopped, and Smitty seemed to be doing
well at first. He winded easily, though, and he quit being able to run for more
than a few feet before he had to lie down and catch his breath.
Cats, like humans, can develop tolerances to medicine.
Smitty needed to have the furosemide dose increased about every two weeks in
order to keep it working properly. By the beginning of August 2013 he had maxed out
the dosage he could handle, his breathing rate shot up to 65 breaths per minute,
(18-20 is normal) and things looked bad. But then an anipal, @KendallKatz, suggested
a different diuretic, torsemide. Kenny’s staff was able to provide a scholarly
paper about its use in cats with cardiomyopathy that we sent to Dr. W.,
Smitty’s cardiologist. She agreed that we should try it, and after only two
days, Smitty’s breathing was back to normal; he was running again! He even
managed to take out a few birds – one he snatched out of mid-air with both
paws! His form was truly restored.
Dr. W. found a pharmaceutical compounding company that would
put the torsemide in a liquid suspension with a fish flavor. This allowed us to
step up the dosage in very small increments. (And Smitty loved the taste! Meds
were now a treat he requested!) But we were all in uncharted waters now. None
of us knew how much a little ten pound kitty could tolerate before this new
medicine quit working or his kidneys failed. We agreed that kidney failure was
a less horrible mode of death than congestive heart failure. Kidney failure
allows toxins to build up in the bloodstream, causing lethargy and eventually a
coma. Congestive heart failure feels like drowning. One gasps and gasps until
the heart quits. (This is true for humans as well as cats.)
Smitty developed a tolerance to torsemide less quickly, and
he handled it well. We did not know for how long though, so we set out on a
deliberate course to treat each day with Smitty as a gift. Smitty taught us not
only to love unconditionally, but to savor literally every second of that love.
Feel it, have it, for each precious moment, wallow in it. No eye blink should
be taken for granted. Every breath, every sweet sigh can last a lifetime if we
let them. Like magic, we made time stand still, for a little while.
We worried for his kidneys. His were young, strong, and
healthy, but spending months pissing gallons, and I mean gallons of urine, takes their toll on even the youngest and the
strongest. At the beginning of December 2013 we noticed that the amount of
urine Smitty produced was starting to flag. Two days later, he stopped eating.
He wouldn’t drink voluntarily anymore, either, and Dr. W. told us that was the
sign. From there, his condition would deteriorate quickly. We scheduled the
appointment to send him over the rainbow bridge (it’s a pretty euphemism). That
night, Smitty began to drink again. Two days later, when we thought we would
be taking him to be put to sleep, we gleefully cancelled the appointment. We
called it a Christmas miracle. Smitty marched on.
In May 2014, we celebrated Smitty’s
one-year-diagnosis-iversary with lobster (Smitty loved lobster). The torsemide
had changed the game. Smitty’s heart still beat. The sense of sand slipping
through an hourglass magnified. Every second of every minute of every day with
Smitty became keen and precious. We stayed mindful of the moments. We wanted
what we had.
Today, with a heavy heart, I finally finish this post to
tell you he has gone. Sweet Smitty Kitty has gone away to a place where he
doesn’t hurt anymore. A place where he can run as far and as fast as he wants
to without losing his breath. Sadly, it is a place where we cannot follow.
In the true spirit of the comrades of the #wlf, Smitty has a
new mission in the 10th Battalion. Smitty will go on to help other
kitties with this same heart condition. You see, this heart condition is rarely
diagnosed in living cats. Usually, the owners don’t know the cat has an
enlarged heart until it just dies suddenly. Smitty’s cough was an unusual side
effect of cardiomyopathy, one that vets rarely see in cats (it is relatively
common in dogs with this condition). In many ways, we got “lucky” that Smitty
coughed. It allowed us to treat the condition, and we got fifteen really great
months that we otherwise would not have gotten.
It also allowed Smitty to become a member of an important collaboration
that the Vet Med college has with another university in Italy. We have donated
his heart to the Vet Med college so that more can be learned about the causes
and course of this disease. We have also given them the extensive notes we kept
after putting him on torsemide. We hope it will help veterinarians to better
treat the condition using torsemide and increase the quality of life for cats
with it. In the end, his kidneys did not kill him. We can’t be certain which,
but either he threw a clot or his sweet little heart just stopped. We found him
at his favorite napping spot in our bedroom. He did not suffer.
As for you, Smitty’s Twitter pals, I am so sorry to have
broken your hearts with this news. Please know how much your Twitter friendship
means to us. We do not yet know if Smitty will Tweet from OTRB or if Smitty’s
Diddy will take up the account and the challenge to help anipals find forever
homes and retweet to get help for Smitty’s friends, Lucy Liberte, the elephant and Tony the Tiger,
who both need to find better homes than the ones they currently endure. For
now, we are just going to try and make it without our “Boo Boo.”
Here are links to some memories of Smitty:
http://www.youtube.com/user/IAmSmittyKitty
(specifically the compilation at the top, and then the vidoes and pictures as
you scroll further down).
*pawhugs* from Smitty’s Mama and Diddy.
31 August 2014
