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Cats never do let on how sick they really are, it protects them in the wild, but it breaks our hearts when we aren't able to help them more, or be with them at the end.
She deserves her own thread, if you go to Rainbow Bridge, in the Pets 'section' there is a "button" at the [almost] top of the page, on the left side, that says NEW POST. Click on it, there are many wonderful people here who understand your pain, post whatever you need or want to, whenever you need, or want to.
One disappeared on us when she was 13. I saw her in the court yard and she took off never to be seen again. We now have an old timer (21) that is still doing well.
Since my original post on this thread we have lost 2 cats. One, the eldest, never did change her routine and spent her last night on the pillow above my head like she always had. The other spent a couple months on the decline but on her final morning I saw her tail sticking out from under a bed in a room she never went into. I knew immediately she was getting ready to go.
Animals do that in the wild so I guess intinctively domesticated ones do it too. It's hard on people who never find the body of their pet because you're left to wonder about it. Hiding their illness is also a problem, by the time you get them help, it can be too late.... especially birds are good at hiding it.
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I have indoor cats and when one was dying he would hide. I tried to get him to come out and be with the other cat but sometimes she would growl at him.
If you think about it animals in the wild need to go off to die. Otherwise, predators would smell their body and come to eat it, endangering the other cats, etc. Same reason cats clean themselves after eating to hide the smell on their mouths for predators to smell and find them. Nature's way of taking care to stay alive.
I went to the vet today and he informed me that my cat has liver cancer and that he will die. I asked if he can operate on my cat to remove the tumor, and he told me that there is no medication for liver cancer. Those anyone has experience this kind of health problems with there cat? My cat is only 9 years old and it's so painful to see him die. He is hiding under my bed and he looks so pail and weak. This is so painful to experience, I feel like I want to die with him.
I went to the vet today and he informed me that my cat has liver cancer and that he will die. I asked if he can operate on my cat to remove the tumor, and he told me that there is no medication for liver cancer. Those anyone has experience this kind of health problems with there cat? My cat is only 9 years old and it's so painful to see him die. He is hiding under my bed and he looks so pail and weak. This is so painful to experience, I feel like I want to die with him.
So sorry to hear this. I'm not sure about treatments for cancer, but I personally always assumed I wouldn't treat aggressively anyway if it was shown a cat of mine had cancer. It is very expensive and it can make the cat feel worse as far as quality of life, and may not extend lifetime very much after all that. Every situation is different though.
In your case, I would think your cat if nothing else could have some kind of medication to ease any suffering he is in, for pain or other symptoms. Hiding is normal when they don't feel right. With a known terminal illness, there should be some palliative/hospice type care that is available, although though this type of thinking is fairly new in veterinary circles, I believe. (It's even not so old in human medicine, really.) Palliative care is about managing pain and stress mainly. Hospice is a more all-encompassing term for end-of-life care, where you make the patient (cat in this case) as comfortable as possible without taking any extraordinary measures.
Or, the other possibility is that he's already suffering so much you should consider euthanasia at this point. I'm not sure if that's the case yet; if so I would think your vet would have said that. But it seems reasonably possible that with certain meds you might get a short time of him feeling a little bit better and more like himself, even if the eventual outcome is inevitable. It just depends upon how far it is progressed.
I found a couple of links that may be of interest:
V's Story (someone's in-depth story of diagnosis and end of life hospice care of cat with liver cancer)
It seems like if your vet simply said there was nothing to do, you may want to be more certain of the exact condition and perhaps get another opinion. I'm not sure if that is your vet being dismissive or that is only you simplifying the situation.
No matter what, I can tell you, it is hard to contemplate what it will be like, but you can get through this. My cat of 17 years died last week and emotionally there are not too many things harder I can think of at the moment but you just get through each day and then the next and then the next.
In terms of watching him suffer though, this is something you can control, to the best of your ability. My cat was to a certain degree hiding a fair bit as well. But it's really a range of things. She still got around, still used the litter box without fail, still drank (didn't eat well though) and still responded positively to attention. I wasn't yet at a conclusion that her quality of life was too low, that she was suffering too much. This is the sort of judgment it would be good to try to make, hard as it will be to consider. And ultimately it is better to let him go than for him to suffer needlessly, if he is past that point.
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I'm not sure about treatments for cancer, but I personally always assumed I wouldn't treat aggressively anyway if it was shown a cat of mine had cancer. It is very expensive and it can make the cat feel worse as far as quality of life, and may not extend lifetime very much after all that. Every situation is different though.
