So yesterday, my cat bit me.
We’ve been having some renovation done to put a bathroom in the basement, and he ended up down there without us realizing (we usually keep the door to the basement closed at all times specifically to avoid letting the cats down there.)

So he was stressed and probably scared, and when I found him down there he just wouldn’t come up despite my efforts to lead him to the stairs. And then he bit me when I tried to pick him up.

Cue a visit to the doctor (antibiotics, rabies shot) who reported it to the health department, who contacted me to let me know of their rabies testing protocol. Long story short, I needed to take him in to get examined today.

So I got him to the university vet department downtown because our usual vet doesn’t do weekends. The vet said that he was fairly sure there wasn’t rabies, but that he had a host of other health problems like a heart murmur and very likely a severe potassium deficit. We knew he’s had hyperthyroidism for a while too.

So, given a choice between getting him hospitalized for a comprehensive workup and a bill in the $3000-4000 range for a likely still poor prognosis or euthanasia, I opted for the latter.

I’m fairly sure I made the right call, but that doesn’t stop me from having all kinds of second thoughts around whether I was acting out of a grudge for the biting incident or otherwise not trying hard enough to help him.

Minor correction: Tetanus shot. They didn’t give me a rabies shot at the time because I thought he’d just been vaccinated - we had him at our regular vet all of ten days ago - but I looked back at the records and he didn’t actually get vaccines then due to health concerns. So I’m also waiting for those results to ward off a different health scare.