It Was A Sad Day In Texas (and Week 2's Results)

I had an incredibly stressful week last week. One of my cats (we have two) was ill and wasn't eating. Anyone with cats knows that if a cat goes 3 days without eating, they can develop liver damage, so cats who don't eat are a big concern. I was hauling him back and forth to the vet every other day, trying different foods and ways to force feed him, the vet running different tests to see if we could find out what was wrong with him, etc.

In the middle of all of that, my other cat started having extreme difficulty breathing, just out of the blue with no prior problems. So we raced him to the vet to find that his chest was filled with fluid, a result of him having lymphoma which we didn't know about. So now we've got one cat hospitalized with a mysterious illness causing him to not want to eat, and we've got another cat stricken with cancer. Because of the severity of the 2nd cat's condition and his age (they're 16 year old brother kitties), the vet didn't think he would survive the weekend, let alone manage a round or two of chemotherapy, so the vet drained the fluid off his chest so he could breathe a bit easier and they sent him home with us for one more night so we could say our goodbyes.

I can't begin to tell you how hard it is to decide to euthanize a pet. It is the most heart-wrenching decision I've ever had to make, and even though we knew he was very sick, he's been a member of our family for over 10 years (we got them from the pound when they were 6 years old) and we didn't want to lose him. But, out of pure love for this cat, we also couldn't watch him suffer and die a natural death from the cancer, so we made the really sad decision to euthanize him.

Our cat died on Saturday, March 21, 2009 at around 12:30pm. He was such a good boy over the years, the loudest purring kittie anyone had ever seen, and he was just the sweetest cat, a really even-tempered guy. His brother, my husband and I will all miss him terribly.

After the shocking loss of one cat, we still had another sick cat left. The vet had started giving him antibiotics mid-week last week because he had started having a low grade fever. After several days on the antibiotics, he slowly started eating on his own, just a little bit. By last night, his fever had broken and he was eating a bit more normally. He's still wandering around the house looking for his brother, so I'm sure he's a bit sad, but he's doing much better now.

And in the middle of all of the chaos from last week, I still managed to lose 2 pounds. So that's a total of 7 pounds gone. I'm just grateful for the loss, no matter what it was, because the stress from last week was pretty intense and I figured my body would react poorly due to it. Thankfully we had DietToGo foods during those days... if not, I probably would have eaten my way through Texas worrying about my cats.