Pets – Page 89

Emma is Running Out of Time

For a few weeks, my wife’s suggestion to try baby food when our cat Emma stopped eating cat food worked miracles. We mixed in taurine since that’s something cats need that isn’t in baby food and she ate eagerly to the tune of 7 to 9 jars a day. She went from 7.7 pounds to 9.5 pounds and while her energy levels were still pretty low, they improved from where they had been. It was remarkable to see after watching her waste away for months.

On the other hand, the chemo we started a few weeks ago didn’t seem to be helping with the underlying disease. And now she’s lost her appetite for even baby food. I think the end of her life is near.

I took her to the vet today for blood work to see if the chemo had damaged her bone marrow, which it can in rare cases. She also got an injection of the anti-nausea medicine we’ve been giving her, as with her digestive issues she may not have been absorbing enough of the medicine from the pills. She wants to eat, even comes into my office to ask me to feed her, but she just can’t eat much at once.

After we got back from the vet so when I got home I let her out of her carrier, went to the bathroom, and went to check on her. She was sprawled in the middle of the basement floor where she doesn’t usually sleep, not moving, and her eyes were unresponsive and staring straight ahead. Fearing she had died I ran down the steps and was relieved to see she was alive but her breaths were shallow and rapid. I called the vet and they thought it might be a stress reaction and to check her gums and bring her in if her breathing didn’t return to normal in 10 minutes.

Her gums were a healthy pink and her breathing did slowly calm down, but it’s shaken her up. She was rather irritated with me after she recovered and went down into my wife’s office where it was dark, then back into the corner under the desk. I’m checking on her occasionally but mostly just letting her sleep, as today was unexpectedly hard on her.

She hasn’t eaten since she came home, hopefully she’ll perk up this evening after she’s had a good rest. I’ve stayed home from work the past two days to encourage her to eat, and will stay home the rest of the week as well, as I think her time is running out.

It’s breaking my heart.

Emma Buys Us Some Time

Emma has had three doses of her chemo drug but it will be another one to three weeks before we know if it is helping. For a while there we weren’t sure if she’d survive long enough for it to matter, as her appetite dropped off severely, but she is devouring baby food and her weight and energy levels are rapidly increasing. She’s come up to snuggle at times and even jumped to the top of the cat tree this afternoon. We’re adding a supplement that isn’t in human food and will still try to get her back on cat food. I don’t know how long it will last, and we still need to get to the bottom of what’s causing her illness, but at this point I’ll take any positive news I can get.

World’s Biggest Cat Toy

Boo does his best E.T. impersonation, hiding out in the toys.

All I Want For Christmas

Emma’s struggles continue and she’s in a fight for her life. Her last hope is a chemo drug that she’ll start tomorrow. We weren’t sure she’d make it long enough to start treatment as last night and this morning she didn’t want to eat much. My wife had the brilliant idea to get some baby food and she’s been eating that today. It’s a stop-gap solution but we’re just trying to keep her strong enough that we can see if the new medicine will help.

All I want this Christmas is for Emma to be healthy again. Here she’s sleeping under the Christmas tree, in previous years she’d spend most of the holidays under the tree but now that she’s sick she’s only there occasionally. It’s been so hard to see my sweet little Em slowly waste away.

Ups & Downs

Emma’s struggles with bowel disease continue. While on the maximum steroid dosage her appetite returned to the point that she was eating several times her normal amount and at least stopped losing weight, even if she wasn’t gaining it. But as we tapered off the steroids the vomiting and loss of appetite returned, so we put her back on the maximum dose.

Her appetite returned and she seemed again to be holding her own but she had a rough night last night full of vomiting and diarrhea. This morning she wouldn’t touch her food and had no energy, although at least she was still drinking water. She had another visit to the vet with some injections and came home a little feisty, which was good to see as this morning I was afraid we were losing her.

She ate some tonight and just came up and kneaded my stomach for a while and purred and purred. She was even getting pretty talkative, unusual for our quiet cat, and now she’s sleeping beside me. It did my heart good to see my little buddy happy again, now we just need to get her healthy too.

Camera Test

I had never pre-ordered any camera gear before but I put in an order for the Canon 7D Mark II as soon as it was announced, it will replace the 7D that I’ve been shooting with for five years. It arrived this afternoon so I threw on a lens and took a quick test shot in the kitchen to make sure it was in good working order. Unfortunately the picture suggests something is wrong with the camera, as it seems to show Sam sitting next to the clean dishes, looking like he owns the place. I know Sam isn’t allowed on the counters, and I know Sam knows he isn’t allowed on the counters, so I can only conclude that this is somehow the camera’s fault.

Sam the Snuggler

I sometimes think Sam is filled with jelly as he can adapt to whatever position I’m in as he snuggles up to sleep. He’s been sleeping in my lap all evening as I get caught up watching Doctor Who.

The Trials of Lady Em

Emma lost more weight than we expected, started throwing up more than normal, and her appetite dropped off. Despite extensive blood work and an ultrasound (you can see part of her belly that got shaved for the ultrasound) there still isn’t any definitive explanation. We are switching the protein source of her food and giving her anti-nausea medicine and she seems to have stabilized, though she is still well under her normal weight.

She doesn’t appear to be in any immediate danger, and her behavior is normal, but I’ll be a lot happier when her weekly weighings show she’s putting on weight.

No One Bothers You When Your Best Friend is an Alligator

We’ve had this stuffed alligator for years but Sam suddenly started sleeping on it this summer. Perhaps he was trying to escape the constant affections of Boo. Hopefully he remembers that when he was a kitten the situation was reversed and it was an orange kitten that was annoying a black-and-white cat. And that nevertheless Scout took him under her wing and they became fast friends until the day she died.

Sam in the Darkness

A sleepy Sam on the loveseat in my darkened office.