Soon I’ll be blogging about our summer adventures, but first I unfortunately have another RIP post, this time for one of our beloved kitties. Smokey was a master cuddler and usually slept in between us or on our pillows. He would meow without sound and wink at you. On August 10 we had to say goodbye to him. We miss him so!

You would think you’d see it coming when a cat develops kidney disease. We didn’t in Smokey’s case. A while back he had a teeth cleaning and some bad teeth were removed, so when we noticed he lost some weight, we thought he was overeating as much anymore. Good, right?

When we were vacationing at Kenosee Lake, we noticed he wanted to go outside all the time, and he’d just lay down in the grass and sleep a lot. Somehow a little unusual for him, but we didn’t think much of it yet. Cats always sleep a lot…

Once we had moved to Buffalo Pound, it deteriorated quickly. He was visibly unwell and weak for 2 days when we felt we needed to get him to a vet ASAP. Should we pack up our motorhome and cut the vacation short, or do we ask for a ride to Regina and see what happens? We decided to ask our friend and neighbour Randy for help. He didn’t think twice, loaded up his kids in the truck and came out to get Nico and Smokey. I was going to stay on the campground and await the news. We kind of expected this to be my last goodbye to Smokey. By then he only wanted to walk in a straight line into the bush, seemingly wanting to curl up and… die?

So Nico kept in touch with me, our vet was booked up and he had to go to the Animal Clinic of Regina who are a walk in clinic. The vet there confirmed Smokey’s bad shape and suspected kidney failure as well. We didn’t get it checked out further, so we are not 100% sure, but we didn’t want to let Smokey suffer and don’t believe in postponing the inevitable.. we had to let him go.

This was hard of course, but Nico came back to the campground and we stayed the rest of the vacation, another week. We felt that it was the best time and place for acceptance and healing.

Thank you beautiful Smokey for your almost eleven years of joy and cuddles! And thanks to our friend Char for bringing him into our lives back then ♥