My baby boy, just 4 years old
Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2020 4:23 pm
On Monday my our gorgeous baby boy, Dylan, died very suddenly, without any sort of warning and it's struck us to the core. We'd been worrying about why he hadn't come in for a couple of hours, calling him out the front and back of the house a few times, and at about half 8, I started to feel that niggling sense that something was very wrong. My husband went out to check the back garden and found Dylan on the patio, where he'd collapsed and died some time earlier. It was a huge shock and utterly crushing because our cats mean everything to us and Dylan was my husband's baby.
Having lost a maine coon-cross 4 years earlier to HCM, we think Dylan died of sudden heart failure. He was a ragdoll-cross that we adopted after our maine coon died in 2016, and part of the reason we took him and his sister (currently snoozing on my lap) was that the RSPCA took their mother in while she was still pregnant, having been rescued from a house with 34 other cats, and the risk of health problems for them both was high. We figured we were aware and suitable equipped to deal with cats with health problems, while others might not have been, so we took them both as soon as possible after they were weaned, and we have done everything we can - given them the best of everything.
Sadly, Dylan was always a slightly sickly cat. He developed feline asthma at just over 1, when we redid the kitchen, and during testing for that they found he had a 'pronounced' heart murmur. He recovered well but his respiration rate was never as low as it should have been. Last year he developed an eye ulcer that took 4 months to heal, followed by another one early this year that, thank goodness, took just 2 weeks. At the time he passed he was a happy, playful, affectionate, greedy little boy, whose only potential symptoms were that he was sick a couple of times last week (this happened often anyway because he got hairballs) and sleeping a bit more (which the other two are doing also because it's cold).
I know we always knew this might happen but...it's always a shock, isn't it? It's always cruel and unfair and although it's never long enough no matter how old they are, four years was far less time than we ever thought we'd get with him.
Rest in peace, Mr Dylan.
Having lost a maine coon-cross 4 years earlier to HCM, we think Dylan died of sudden heart failure. He was a ragdoll-cross that we adopted after our maine coon died in 2016, and part of the reason we took him and his sister (currently snoozing on my lap) was that the RSPCA took their mother in while she was still pregnant, having been rescued from a house with 34 other cats, and the risk of health problems for them both was high. We figured we were aware and suitable equipped to deal with cats with health problems, while others might not have been, so we took them both as soon as possible after they were weaned, and we have done everything we can - given them the best of everything.
Sadly, Dylan was always a slightly sickly cat. He developed feline asthma at just over 1, when we redid the kitchen, and during testing for that they found he had a 'pronounced' heart murmur. He recovered well but his respiration rate was never as low as it should have been. Last year he developed an eye ulcer that took 4 months to heal, followed by another one early this year that, thank goodness, took just 2 weeks. At the time he passed he was a happy, playful, affectionate, greedy little boy, whose only potential symptoms were that he was sick a couple of times last week (this happened often anyway because he got hairballs) and sleeping a bit more (which the other two are doing also because it's cold).
I know we always knew this might happen but...it's always a shock, isn't it? It's always cruel and unfair and although it's never long enough no matter how old they are, four years was far less time than we ever thought we'd get with him.
Rest in peace, Mr Dylan.