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Friday, November 19, 2004

This poor cat.

On Thursday (yesterday), I made an appointment for her to go in to the vet on Friday after work, since she's still not eating.

But once I got home from work on Thursday night, I was even LESS satisfied with her condition than I'd been when I made the appointment. So I called to change the appointment to Friday morning. Mark had taken Friday off, since he needs to use up his vacation days, so I figured he could help get us there and back.

To make a long story less long, she's lost even more weight now. She's something like 5.11 lbs now, which is a pretty significant drop from her weight of 6 lbs-something oz from ten days ago.

The most aggressive possible treatment would be to hospitalize her, have her on IV, surgically insert a feeding tube, and have her in there until Monday or Tuesday at the least. But the estimated bill for that was over $1300.

I want to give her EVERY possible chance to pull through this, believe me. But I felt that was an awful lot of invasive treatment when we don't even know what's wrong yet. So the next-most-aggressive treatment involved my learning to administer subcutaneous fluids and feeding her soft, mega-nutrient cat food via a big syringe.

I opted for that instead. I am very leery about doing surgical procedures on her until we know WHAT exactly is causing the problem in the first place. And besides the blood test that they're doing today, and will have some answers for me by tomorrow, we really can't find out the source of the issue until she gets an ultrasound on December 1.

Argh.

They gave me some anti-nausea meds for Harmony, which is good because she's had trouble keeping anything down for the past couple days. :o( And they taught me how to do the Sub-Q fluid, which seems to be a straightforward process. And I took part in the first of the syringe feedings (of which she only kept down about half the food we gave her).

I'm exhausted and so is Harmony.

Keep praying that whatever this is, it's correctable. My fear is that it could turn out to be something untreatable, which would be heartbreaking. Of course, so is all THIS that's been going on for the past couple weeks, but it's a different kind of heartbreak. Right now, since we don't know what's wrong, there's still that potential that it's treatable.

OK, I'm rambling now. I'd better just send this.

My spirit is tired.

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