Thursday 4th January 2018

So it was early 2009, we had lost Jasper to illness and Garfield was not doing great either. Cookie was still a kitten really, but she had learnt to boss our 2 male cats fairly early on. I think she did miss Jasper when he was gone, Garfield definitely missed his brother as he would wander around alot as if searching for him.

We started to get as settled as we could in the new place, even though from the very start there Hales didn’t really like the place. She couldn’t really put her finger on the reason why, but it was obvious to me she wasnt totally settled there.

Garfield continued to amaze me at how quickly he adapted to the new place, and managed to get around being totally blind by then. We were taking him to the vets regularly for check ups and it was at one of these that the vet told us his kidneys were starting to totally fail. We were told that he would be starting to suffer because of this and that was one thing i would never let my cat go through.

So we made the extremely difficult decision to end his suffering and let him go. Garfield had always been my cat and Jasper more Hales cat. No particular reason for this, it was just the way it was. If I thought it had been hard holding Jasper while he was put to sleep I was in for a huge shock having to do it with Garfield!

It genuinely broke my heart, holding him and feeling his little heart take it’s last beat and him take his last breath. That was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, I am actually in tears right now trying to write this!

I was still working hard running my business, and I was still managing to get some scuba diving in as well. I was starting to notice that I was struggling a little bit with moving about with all my diving gear on, but not enough at that time to stop me.

I was helping a friend when she was teaching new divers so that gave me chance to carry on with my diving and take loads of photos which was the thing I really enjoyed while scuba diving. I was still improving my diving qualifications and was starting to do my rescue diver course.