I found 1ish year old Sean at the Boston SPCA. He was outgoing and enormous. He had a crazy loud and broken sounding rumblepurr and his nictitating membranes were sort of slow and “stupid.” I thought he was going to be a bit of a big dumb animal but he turned out to be outrageously smart.
He was always an interesting cat, but with a bit of a mean streak towards me. After I left school in 96 to move to San Francisco, I sent him and Duffy out to live with my Mom and Gram in Seattle while I got settled. At his first Seattle vet visit mom called with bad news. “The vet said he has a bad heart. The worst murmur he’s ever heard. He’ll probably be dead within 6 months.”

The settling ended up taking 3 years, but the eventually came back. In the meantime Mom had turned Sean into a ridiculously sweet little big guy.

Every time I took Sean to the vet after, each new vet would listen to his heart with a startled look on her face and say “Worst murmur I’ve ever heard. He’ll be dead in 6 months. But my, what a sweet cat.” They would do an ultrasound at a few hundred bucks, give me some meds and send me away. After a couple of years of this I stopped doing the ultrasounds, because it was always the same thing: Dead in 6 months.

A few years ago I stopped giving him the meds because they made him throw up and made him grouchy. As the years went on it didn’t seem to matter.

Last year in late april Duffy disappeared. Just never came home one day. I had my first trip to Europe planned in May, so Gram came down to stay and take care of him. He got really sick while I was away, couldn’t keep anything down. We took him to the vets during several bouts of this. Over a few months he lost about hal of his body weight, but this level off and he seemed fine if a ghost of himself.

Six months ago he started breathing very heavily. I took him to the vet thinking it might be time to put him down. They told me he was in congestive heart failure. Prognosis very poor, but they could easily get him out of the crisis. So I did… at a cost of about 2K. They gave me Lasiks, specifically to keep the fluid off of his lungs and heart. And he was quite good for several more months, so more so that I got him a new friend, Pumpkin, since he was pretty down. It definitely improved his spirits.
A few weeks ago, Sean started feeling poorly again with labored breathing. He started sleeping under the bed, his usual signal that he was sick. I doubled up his meds, and sure enough a lot of fluid apparently came out of his innards, and he had “water bags” in his belly and neck. But no improvement.

I called mom and she came down to be with me while we took him to the vet for the last time. That’s the first time I put a pet to sleep. I had no idea how hard it would be.