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- Oct 19, 2018
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Hi, everyone. This post is about our beautiful solid white cat Daphne. Someone had dropped Daphne off near our house when she was about five months old. The poor little girl was very skinny and had diarrhea. We were actually going to nurse her to health and get all of her shots and send her to a friend of my husband. However, I fell in love with Daphne very quickly (by the way, my husband and I were watching a lot of Frasier reruns when we found her, so that's where her name Daphne came from). Daphne was very shy around everyone except for my husband and me. She was incredibly sweet. She also didn't actually meow...instead she squeaked (we said.she "queaked" and nicknamed her "Queakers". Daphne would look us in the eye and talk to us. A couple of times, my husband and I sang, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands..." and Daphne queaked twice right on cue. She was a beautiful little angel, but the poor baby had frequent health problems. We often took her to the vet's. But even when she was sick, she was very sweet and affectionate. In November or December of 2015, she developed some kind of lesion on her nose, and it grew. The vet removed it and biopsied it, and poor Daphne had to wear an Elizabethan collar for several weeks. But even with that collar, she was as affectionate as she could be.
She finally had the cone taken off, and she joyfully ran around the house. She was as healthy as I had ever seen her. But on January 7th, my husband and I came home and Daphne was very lethargic. She weakly queaked at me, and her eyes were half closed. Then I saw her in the kitchen, and blood was coming out of her ears. I called the emergency vet number and she said Daphne probably got into a tousle with one of our other cats (which did happen from time to time) and to bring her in the next morning. During the night, my husband said Daphne vomited and the vomit had blood. We brought her to the vet's the next morning, and they did bloodwork on her. When the vet came back into the examination room, she said Daphne was a very sick kitty. Her bloodwork showed she had almost no RBCs and she was dangerously low in other areas. All that could be done was for her to have emergency transfusions, and she would need to be kept for several weeks. I was devastated to hear that because Daphne never ate while she was kept at the vet's, and I couldn't bear to think about how terrified she would be. The vet said dogs had a fifty percent chance of surviving the procedure, but cats had a lower chance. Daphne was also so frail that she would have been at even higher risk. Daphne was only eight years old, but we couldn't stand the thought of her suffering, so we made the heartbreaking decision to have her put to sleep. I couldn't stay in the room while it was done, but my husband stayed with Daphne. He said the vet tried to give Daphne the first shot, and Daphne kept crawling back to him so that he would protect her. He said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do, and he still says he feels like he betrayed her. I tell him that she was really sick and she would have suffered and still probably would not have survived (but we both sometimes wonder if we did the right thing). My username is DaphnesMommy because the day she died was the first day I visited TheCatSite, but I was much too upset to post a thread about Daphne. I still miss Daphne so much. I have seen pictures of Jesus holding a lost little lamb, and I try to picture him holding Daphne like that. I hope I see her again.
