Yesterday was not a good day, but let me back up a little bit to better times.
My gf has been working from home since the pandemic, so we did something we've been talking about for a long time. Our townhouse is by no means big, but it's just the two of us and we have 3 "bedrooms" upstairs, so we did some work and turned one into a guest room. Only thing was we expected our primary guests to be cats and we contacted and began working with our local SPCA on fostering.
Although most fosters are kittens, our first one was actually a 10ish year old named Milo. He was a thin and quirky old man who stayed with us a month. He had a respiratory issue that regularly had him snorting, which was his trademark. He had a thyroid issue that meant he needed a small pill twice a day, but thankfully we've never met a cat before so easy to feed a pill to, he was a champ with it. Right before we returned him to the SPCA he started getting a little snotty, and when they took him back in they found he had an upper respiratory infection. The plan was he would right that ship and be up for adoption soon.
That was not to be sadly. He never got quite right and eventually the staff decided to do more tests and eventually determined he had cancer. We got the news at noon yesterday and were heartbroken. We're very thankful the shelter gave us a time at 5pm to go in and see him yesterday, and he was the same cat we remembered, not yet in any obvious discomfort. We spent a half hour with him, said some very hard goodbyes and headed home. He's set to be put down today.
I was 14 when I last had a dog pass, and am 34 now. One takeaway from that is I can't believe I went from age 14 to 26 without a cat or dog around. The other is that if Milo's situation is any indication I am going to be an absolute mess if/when something happens to one of our four cats.