It is with immeasurable grief, that I must report that our beloved white cat, Austin, has passed away, 16 years old. He was battling a severe case of squamous cell carcinoma since 2021, that started on the lower eyelid of his left eye. For awhile he did very much better on rapamycin, which stopped the spread to the rest of his body, but despite our escalating the dose, it never arrested the original site. It kept getting worse.
Eventually, the cancer ate away all around the eye, burned through to his nasal passages and gangrene set in despite the use of antibiotics. His quality of life got to the point where we felt it was bordering on cruelty to subject him to daily pill stuffing, injections and pain killers. We made the difficult decision to put him down and a special service vet came over to administer the drugs.
We tried to make his last weeks the best we knew how to, he had the full run of the house with zero restrictions, plenty of love and treats. He used to walk on a leash around the garden and a short distance beyond the gate, and on the last day, just hours before the vet came, he took a long, long walk off leash where he smelled all his usual places, branches, bushes and grass. It was as if he was saying goodbye to the world. He finally stopped and as we sat on the grass in the garden, he crawled into my lap, then my wifeās lap looking up at our faces as if he knewā¦ he was such a wise cat. This behavior was different from his usual. He talked to us looking at us - gentle sounds. I cannot express to you how I felt, knowing that he trusted us and we had to do this horrifyingly difficult thing. It felt like a knife stabbing me in the heart. He acted very calm when the stranger came - the vet - to the garden and sat down. My wife dealt with all the paperwork, and Austin just sat there looking at us. We all decided that it would happen right there, in his favorite sunning spot in the garden. And so it did. He didnāt even flinch with the injections. He went to sleep and then the final doses were delivered, we gently stroked him throughout.
I canāt help going over in my mind what I could have done better, despite my wifeās protests that we did all we could. It seems like we moved mountains, chasing down every study that would be remotely relevant, flying out to meet researchers of a paper who had access to drugs used in that paper that were not commercially available. I picked up the drugs and consulted far and wide. But nothing helped. The decline was extremely fast. The cancer seemed to grow literally every hour as we examined it minutely. Within a few weeks it went from just bleeding to severe tissue loss. We did all we could and knew, we stayed up nights just watching him rest, treasuring every minute of life spent together.
And now heās gone. Everything reminds us of him, his routines, how he greeted us every morning, and now just emptiness.
Love your little furry friend, because one day heāll be gone.
Goodbye Austin 
