Can't find the right words.
Love & Purrs
Suz&Spicey

I never got the chance to do the merciful thing with my beloved Whitefoot.

It was early August of 2000, and Whitefoot had been sleeping a lot, but it
was awfully hot out, so I didn't think much of it and never realized he'd
been running a fever for a few days. In fact, by the time I realized there
was something wrong and took him to the vet, his temperature was normal.
Little did I know at the time that he had less than 24 hours left to live.

My neighbor's kitty had died of what we had assumed was poisoning about a
week earlier. She had been missing for nearly a week, then one day we heard
her crying oddly under the deck. My neighbor was about to leave for work and
asked me to look after the kitty until she got home, and take her to the vet
if necessary.

Kitty drank a bit of water and laid down to sleep. Every once in a while she
let out a mournful meow. The third or fourth time she cried out, and I went
to her, she stretched out all her legs and shook, then died.

When I realized that Whitefoot was sick, it was because he started wobbling
and losing his balance when he walked. I took him to the nearest vet, who
turned out to be an idiot... He said my Whitefoot was acting this way
because he needed worming, and gave me some awful paste to force down his
throat, which I did, because I believed this vet, who was dead wrong. That
was on a Saturday morning.

By around 10 PM that evening, Whitefoot was completely unable to walk and
was laying under my bed, breathing shallowly and occasionally groaning. I
searched all over the internet for any information on what his symptoms
could mean. Around midnight, I found this:

http://www.merckvetmanual.com/mvm/index.jsp?cfile=htm/bc/10404.htm

I didn't expect Whitefoot to make it through the night, but he did. I had
stayed awake with him until around 4:30. I called a different vet early
Sunday morning and made arrangements to meet him at his office in an hour. I
figured this disease was probably what killed the neighbor's kitty, and that
Whitefoot would probably have to be PTS, because his temperature by this
time was subnormal.

Halfway to the vet's office, Whitefoot had a seizure and died, on a pillow,
on the floor of the passenger side of the car.

A week later, my last surviving kitty got the same disease. This time I
suspected, as soon as I knew she had a fever, what it might be, and took her
to a vet. The parasite was not showing up in her blood yet. It often does
not show up in the blood at all until the disease is near the end stage,
when it is too late to save them.

The vet told me that if they attempted treatment, kitty would need to stay
in the vet's office for the duration, and that it would be very painful for
her, and very expensive for me, with very little chance of saving the kitty.

I wasn't sure how much time she had left but I let her stay on my lap as
much as she wanted to, and the rest of the time, I held her like a baby. Her
final hours began late on Saturday night. I knew she would not make it until
the morning, and that she would suffer immensely during the night, so I
asked a neighbor to help me. When she got to the stage of being unable to
walk, my neighbor put a .22 bullet into her head.

That was the most difficult and horrific experience of my whole life.