Sad Day

It is a sad day in the Hahn house today; and probably not a very good day to pick up writing things on here again, but today we needed to make a difficult choice. We had to put our cat of 17 years to sleep. We got him as a friend for our other cat at the time as a 1 year old from an ad in the paper. We paid $20 for him (I think, Kris would probably remember). His owner at the time was going through a divorce and had a couple of cats already and didn't have room for Gizmo. I remember him saying that he figured if someone was willing to pay for him he would be assured that he was going to a good home.

Gizmo started acting strange on Thursday night, and by Saturday he hadn't gotten any better so after Kris and I talked it over we decided to see if the vet could see him on Saturday morning. The vet ran a couple of tests and said that the initial diagnosis was kidney disease, but the tests would tell us to what extent it was. Based on how Gizmo was acting I didn't think it was going to be good news. We got the confirmation today. His kidneys were shutting down, and it was just a matter of time. I am sure we did the right thing.

We were blessed to have had Gizmo for 17 years and he never had any sort of illness other than a kitty cold here and there. He was fun, and lovably stupid. He never did figure out how to push open a door. You could be on the opposite side of a door, looking at him thru a crack with an open can of tuna, and he would walk in circles, meowing because he couldn't figure out how to get thru the doorway for his treat.

Alison is particularly sad. We tried to explain to her that it just just Gizmo's time. She said she already misses him and he has only been gone for a couple of hours. But with each day that goes by I am sure it will become easier for her. She was already talking about going to the humane society to look for a new kitty.

When Punken died a couple of years ago, Ali had a dream that he came to visit her in her room one night and that made her feel better. Hopefully she'll have a similar dream with Gizmo to help her feel better.