Rest Well, Ringo

Today, a bright and sunny Thursday, 23th July, our poor cat Ringo was put to sleep. You may remember Ringo from an article a long time ago, talking about his life. We also had a April Fools blog post where Ringo took over the website for a bit. Ringo is one of the two cats I’ve ever owned and, once he became a family member, he was accepted and grew up to have a happy life.

Unfortunately, his life was recently cut short, due to cancer. He was ill, he was tired and he was refusing to eat. Ringo knew it was his time to go and tried to cling on as long as possible. What we thought was just a spot in his mouth turned out to be an insanely aggressive cancer that quickly spread to the rest of his body. In the end, his only options were a slow, painful death or euthanasia. To spare him from more pain, we made the difficult decision to put Ringo to sleep.

We adopted Ringo back when we lived in the middle of fucking nowhere. He was skinny back then, and very jittery. If anything, Ringo preferred being an outdoor car for a while, but he slowly made his way inside our house and inside our hearts. Ringo was quite a pain at times, always trying to steal food, because he was always hungry.

Eventually though, we planned to sell the house in the middle of nowhere. It was swiftly decided that sister would take Mog, mum would take Colin and brother and I would take Ringo, in our new apartment.

Although Ringo was terrified at first, he swiftly got used to his new home. He realized that he was the only cat in the house, and because of this, he dropped his guard a little. He stopped skittering around all the time and found plenty of little hiding spots he could sleep in. Ringo remained a single cat, even as we moved into another apartment.

But even when we re-adopted Mog (our sister moved to the UK and couldn’t take Mog with her), Ringo still somehow remained somewhat cool, and made sure that Mog knew he was in charge. Most of the time. They ended up in an arms race over the best spots to sleep in. Surprisingly, Ringo and Mog ended up getting along no problem.

Ringo ended up living a happy life, up until about three weeks ago. A small lump in his mouth was causing Ringo difficulties in eating food. We took him to the vet, who took a sample and sent it off to find out what the problem was. Before we could do anything though, Ringo’s health suddenly dropped rapidly. His eating problem turned into a complete and utter difficulty to eat, and Ringo would leave a trail of saliva on everything. We discovered that Ringo had cancer.

Despite all our attempts, we couldn’t save him. At the end, poor Ringo had so many horrible symptoms. Thanks to one lump, Ringo lost the ability to properly eat, he struggled to drink water and was rapidly losing weight. He’d lost a whole kilo in two weeks, a good 1/5 of his body weight. The fur was falling off his cheeks, his paws were crusty from being unable to clean himself and he barely moved. Despite drinking tons of water, Ringo was also rather dehydrated.

At the vet’s recommendation, brother and I decided it was best to put Ringo down. He was suffering far too much. We stood by Ringo’s side as the vet gave him his injections one at a time, gently stroking and caressing him, until Ringo finally fell asleep and found peace.

He was always such a lovely little cat. A little jittery, even at the end, but that can always be forgiven.

Good night, Ringo. I’ll miss you.