I have had my cat since I was 9 years old. He's almost 20 now. Remarkably, he has managed to avoid any chronic or terminal diseases. His kidneys are good for his age, no arthritis, no cancer. The only long-term thing is that he's deaf.
But he still has constant health problems. "Little" things. Or temporary things, at least. But they're painful and stressful. He had to have several of his teeth removed a couple years ago. That was the first big thing of his life. A while after that, a sore opened on his cheek related to the infection that necessitated the tooth extractions. It took a couple months of antibiotics and follow-ups to get that under control without further surgery. Around this time he started having issues staying hydrated. No apparent cause after a battery of tests, so I've been trying different things for months to no avail. I give him daily fluids which he absolutely hates. A few months ago he had to have a benign mass removed from his head. So more surgery and medications. A month or so after that he got what later turned out to be vestibular disease; he just couldn't stand up one evening and would start thrashing like he was having a seizure. That took a couple weeks to subside after a visit to the emergency vet, but it caused him an extreme amount of stress; I've never seen him so terrified.. Now this week he has another benign mass (this time on his paw) which will require surgery again because it's worse than the first one.
And I just don't know how to navigate this. At home he's reasonably active and social. He eats, drinks, uses his litter box. His quality of life is good by all the normal metrics. But at the same time, he's constantly going to the vet and dealing with some new one-off thing. Getting poked with needles, put under for surgery, recovering with bandages and cones. And before he's fully recovered something new pops up and he's back in before he was fully out. It's been almost two years of this.
I've only ever had pets go because of something sudden and clearly severe: getting hit by a car, kidney failure, cancer. Without that, I don't know when enough is enough. All the advice I read is in relation to cats that are in constant pain from a chronic illness. This isn't that, but it feels just the same as with my pets in the past: like I'm putting him through hell to keep him alive.
Has anyone been through anything similar? What do you do?
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/e5d7db/when_do_all_the_small_medical_things_become_too/
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