Janie - as Minim said, you had to make a decision & that is what you did. We will always wonder afterwards if we made the right one, everybody does.
A year or so back, DD & her b/f lost their beloved cat. He was perfect in every way imagineable, outgoing, friendly, loving, wonderful with their (at the time) baby, perfectly behaved in all situations, (they even brought him here when they came to visit & he was just exquisite!). He was only a young cat, not much over a year old.
He was also unlucky enough to have an incredibly rare & rather awful genetic disease that meant his skin got progressively weaker & thinner.
They had him stitched up initially (thinking it was an horrific accident that caused it) but he continued to have 'accidents' as time went on & eventually the vets became suspicious & he was diagnosed. DD & her b/f were told it was progressive & there was no treatment & no cure.
Eventually, he had to wear a collar all the time & have his open cuts bathed several times a day. Finally, all too soon, the day came when the vets 'phoned to say his skin was simply tearing as they tried to stitch up his latest cut & he was pts there & then as it was now clearly hopeless & he was fast approaching the stage where he would have little to no quality of life left. Even the vet cried, he was such a popular character.
DD quizzed me for ages afterwards on whether they had done the right thing in not having him pts earlier but he was here with his collar on at one point & he came to call when she called him upstairs to have his cuts bathed & just sat there whilst she did it. He was funny & happy the whole time, rolling round the floor with my g'daughter & chasing after toys.
She also quizzed me on whether she had done the right thing in having him pts too soon, though she knew in her heart that they had reached the bend in the river & she didn't want to see him lose his happy go lucky personality, though it was hard to say goodbye whilst he still seemed so full of life.
As you can see, you are not alone Janie; treatment or no treatment, prolonged hospital stays in the hope of more info etc. or stay comfy at home etc. etc. All I can say is, I know DD & her b/f made sensible & justifiable decisions at the time, though their sadness at the complete 'unfairness' of it all made them question this repeatedly, certainly initially, though it no longer preys on their minds now even though they still view it all as grossly 'unfair', which it was of course!
I think you are leaping ahead perhaps & imagining a worse case scenario, in which case you feel (now) that it might be hard to judge whether his fear etc. (it won't be keeping him awake at night though, I promise you!) in some of the situations would have been 'pointless' but we do have to base our decisions on the here & now, not the future & if the decision is a good & intelligent one, (I won't say right one, as there may be more than one option!), then we have done our best at the time & with what info was available to us at that time?
It is a hard choice but as long as we know when to draw the line & say enough is enough, trying stuff that may well help, even if temporarily somewhat scary or unpleasant for the animal in question, is a lot easier to live with than doing nothing at all & wondering if we should have done more or tried harder!
(Hence my story above, he wasn't suffering horribly but he could have done without a lot of it & good-natured though he was, he must've thought 'Oh FFS' at times, I'm sure but he sure wasn't dragged on to the bitter end or put through it just to allow them to cling on to him a while longer, he was still living life up until the point the seesaw tipped against him & it would have been rapidly all downhill from there on in!)
Whatever happens with Louis, I'm sure you will come to see that you tried your best & made sensible decisions, not ones based on pure emotion from either viewpoint of the spectrum! xx
