Today we had to euthanize Ranae, our 15-year-old tuxedo cat.

Plato’s Cave

A little over a year ago she was diagnosed with diabetes. We guessed at the time that she’d had it for a while, since, when we put her on “kitty Atkins” (Fancy Feast cat food) and Glipizide (an oral glucose-control medication), she changed from a sedentary cat with tendency towards nasal infections to a much more active and healthy feline, chasing around the house at high speed with Cleo, our other cat.

Then, two days ago, she stopped eating, and her belly felt taut. She’d always been somewhat overweight, but this wasn’t right, and she was obviously uncomfortable, so we took her in to the vet. An x-ray showed an enormous mass of some sort almost filling her abdomen. Since she didn’t have “the look” that cats get when they’re ready to give up, we decided on exploratory surgery (laparoscopic). The vet was astonished at what she found: an enormous malignancy, no trace of her pancreas, one kidney compromised, and metastases everywhere. Her guess was pancreatic cancer, the probable cause of her diabetes. But she had never seen so advanced a tumor in a cat who had been apparently healthy until only days before.

So, as we’d discussed, Ranae never woke up from the anesthesia. We’ll get her ashes in a couple of weeks, to join the other cats in the little kitty cemetery at the side of the house.