The Death of Ambrose: An Exorcism

Posted on December 31, 2002 in Cats

E’li, E’li, lämå, så-bach’-tha’-ni? [Matthew: 27:46]

Heaving that produced nothing. Heavy, deep heaving which dented his sides and yet didn’t expel even an asthma attack. He’d been crouching in the same spot next to the door of the office for two hours, I think, when I noticed his unnatural stillness. “Ambrose?” I said. “Are you all right?” I got up and walked towards him, knelt and gave a little prod to his butt. He scurried a couple of steps towards one of the sheets of paper that had slipped to the floor and started to heave. Then stopped.

I walked back to the office chair. Sat down and watched him. He moved another few steps, stopping again in front of a piece of paper. I called to Lynn to come look at him. She came to the door, bent over to touch him, and the heaving started again.

I went over to join her. It looked to us that he was trying to throw up. I gently pressed his sides. “It’s OK, Little Boy. You can do it.” But he couldn’t. I sent Lynn over to the computer, to see what she could find on helping a cat to throw up. I stayed with Ambrose, asking him to explain what was wrong as best he could. He scurried a bit and kept up the bit with the spastic diaphragm. He wasn’t purring at my touches.

“I found a page!” Lynn called. “I’ve got a page on how to make a cat vomit on the screen.” I read over her shoulder. The advice said not to attempt it if the cat had ingested the poison more than two hours before. We weren’t sure when he could have got into something. Lynn guessed he might have swallowed a tab of Benadryl because she had trouble opening the bottle. She brought me the cell phone and a telephone book. I called two vet ER clinics. The receptionist at one thought they were too far away. I found a closer one in Mission Viejo and arranged to arrive in about twenty to thirty minutes. (We live at the edge of a national forest.)

Lynn had packed Ambrose up into his carrier, the inside of which he hadn’t seen since we moved down from Northern California. The memory, no doubt, was an unhappy one: seven straight hours of confinement atop a growling motor and arrival in a place where the furniture was unfamiliar. We had a momentary lapse of communication as I rushed out front to get the truck and Lynn, lagging a few steps behind, didn’t hear me tell her to wait in front of the condo. I brought the truck around, Lynn found me, and we drove off into the darkness.

It seemed that every light was red and that every one who had ever wanted to make a left turn from the other direction was out for last minute Christmas shopping. I cursed them, then reminded myself that the universe had no plan, just a lot of objects crossing the paths of others at mostly random intervals from the perspective of any one object in that cosmos. Ambrose just pressed his head against the bars of the cage, huffing loudly. Whenever we stopped, I touched his head briefly and assured him that the people at the clinic would make him feel better.

We finally got to the left turn, found the driveway that slid precipitously down into the parking lot of the animal emergency clinic, jumped from the truck, and bustled through the automatic doors. The receptionist took him right in. A veterinary nurse came out and interrogated us about our reasons for bringing him. When we both started up at once, he asked us to stop and go one at a time. I let Lynn, the calmer of the two of us explain what we thought had happened. The nurse looked at the label of the bottle and told us that he doubted that the benadryl was Ambrose’s affliction. There was hardly enough benadryl in a tablet to do more than make him sleepy at that size. Our twenty five pound bouncing baby boy was in respiratory distress. Lynn told them about the heart murmur. He needed tests.

We signed the papers authorizing emergency treatment. I walked over to a salt water tank to stare at the lion fishes. The receptionist beckoned us and told us that the doctor would see us in the consultation room. We went inside. A short, thin woman with closely cropped blonde hair came inside. Her name, sewn on the white lab coat, said she was Dr. Heidi Schouten.

Ambrose was in an oxygen cage, she told us. They’d do some ultrasound to see what they could find if we assented. I nodded and lingered in the consultation room for a few minutes before I got bored and wandered out into the lobby.

I spied a hot water machine and went over to make myself a cup of hot tea. They had only one bag of mint herbal and I took it. The bag was steeping when the receptionist told me that the doctor was ready to see us again.

A few minutes later, while the tea was still brewing, she came back wearing a long face. The news was bad. They’d spotted fluid in his lungs and in the chest cavity. The least of the maladies which could be afflicting my poor little boy was congestive heart failure. If we acted aggressively, the doctor went on, we might be able to halt the spread of this incident. After that, he’d spend the rest of his life, which would probably be brief, taking medications and undergoing regular and upsetting tests.

“I need about ten minutes,” I said. Lynn nodded in agreement. We went outside. I knew that putting him down was the right thing under the circumstances. That decision was clear. I needed the break mostly for myself. Not to sooth my feelings, but to throw something in the face of God. I used the yet undrunk cup of hot tea.

We went back in and asked to see the doctor. Arrangements were made for the killing of my little boy. I mumbled something about Lynn being out of a job and being short on money as reasons why we couldn’t help as we might have missed. She smiled sadly and said “Even if you had a million dollars, saving his life wouldn’t be certain and his suffering would be.” I thanked her for her support and went out with Lynn to arrange the payments and make arrangements to have him privately cremated.

They brought him back in after that formality was done, wrapped in a blue blanket. I held him close and wept into his fur. He was scared and tried to find a hole to crawl into. I said, clutching him for one last time: “Ambrose, I said, when you get to God, tell him to stop the bad news. Tell Him I can’t take any more of this.” Then I knocked on the door and walked away, miserable because I had left him to die in this sour smelling place, surrounded by strange people wearing sky blue and white smocks. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t understand.

John: 19:30.

Postscript: Thoughts and memories have a way of becoming crudely alloyed when you return to them afterwards. Bits of myth of your own invention creep in. I don’t know exactly where in the scene at the vet’s to place the incident, so let me just recall that the thought passed through my mind when I talked to the doctor. It wasn’t said in denial, just shock: I simply told her that the night before he’d been all over me, purring and playing as always. She nodded her head. The suddenness of it all was acknowledged.