Poor Kitty

My poor little kitty Mojo (or No-No, if you're the Little Man) is sick. She won't eat. She used to pork out on just about any cat food in range of her snout. Last summer she had gotten so hefty that she could barely squeeze her way through the banisters on our stairs to escape pursuit by the Little Man. Now, she can go through without touching.

Her weight loss was pretty gradual - I finally became concerned about it in November. When I took her to the kitty doc, she had lost 5 pounds - a lot for a 14-lb. cat. The doc did her exam thing, and the super-expensive blood test and the result was that hey! she's not eating! and it was causing her liver to start eating itself. So the answer was that I needed to feed her! Which I'm thinking I could have figured out without the $150 blood test, but I guess it's nice to know it wasn't something else.

We started plying her with a variety of wet cat foods, and discovered that she had become extremely finicky. We finally found some treats & food she would nibble at, but have to keep rotating them because all of a sudden the pick of the week will fall out of favor. We kept an eye on her and thought she was eating the appropriate amount, and maybe gaining a little weight. But I got worried again and took her in again last week, and she had lost an additional 2 pounds. And now has a heart murmur. After an x-ray and additional blood tests, we still know that Hey! She's still not eating! And they can't find anything wrong, so maybe it's irritable bowl, and maybe it's cancer. And for $2,500 in additional tests we can find out for sure.

I love my kitty, but I'm enough of a farm girl that it's hard for me to spend that kind of money on an pet. Especially since my vet told me that they may or may not find out for sure, and if it is cancer we could spend several more thousands of dollars for treatment to maybe extend her life for 15 months. With either diagnosis the treatment was the same medication - dosage was the only question.

So, we've decided to go with the pills without the tests. There's a chance they will kill her, and a chance they will make her better, and a chance they'll make her better for a little while and then she'll die anyway. I'm starting to get paranoid that I'll walk into my room and find her dead on my bed. I'm not sure how I'll deal with that.

She's sitting on my lap now, keeping warm. All bones and fur, curled up in a little ball, purring. I truly, truly hope she gets better soon.