concern for my cat
I am very worried about my cat, Toby (the orange one who appears in Friday Cat blogging). He's very much not himself. Now, you may wonder how one can tell if a cat is not himself, when all he does is eat, sleep and use the litter box, but really, you can. Toby is not himself. He has suddenly dropped weight, and looks like a bag of bones. He has no muscle tone—when he tries to jump onto one of his favorite spots, he's been coming up a little short. He's walking around like he's hating life—and he hasn't eaten anything in a few days, except a few spoonfuls of baby food. He loves baby food (gerber chicken with chicken gravy), and yesterday he even turned that down. The only thing he's doing "right" is that is drinking a normal amount of water and is peeing just fine.
Toby is a cancer survivor kitty, one of the 2% that make it to the "cured" stage of gastrointestinal lymphoma. That was a few years ago. Now, the only doctor I take him to is his oncologist, even just for checkups. The oncologist loves my cat, says Toby is his favorite—and really means it. They call me up out of the blue just to see how he is. So when I went in yesterday just to chat and say "hey, he's not looking so good, can I bring him in tomorrow" of course they rearranged their schedule so he could be seen—and of course I just started crying right there, at "hey".
It would be nice if it's just an all of a sudden "I hate this food so I'm not eating it" sort of thing, but I don't really think it is. If he comes out of this checkup ok, though, I'm sure there will be food-changing suggestions and maybe even a recipe to start making at home. That's fine—I can cook rice and chicken and put vitamins and what not into it.
But I really think my boy is on his last legs. He's not even hanging out with
me anymore—he just goes from his hammock under the couch to the paper bags on the kitchen floor, to the sink in the bathroom (he loves sinks), then back to his hammock. I guess it's good that he still follows his little routine, but I'd like it to contain "eating" at some point.
I spent the last couple of days just looking at him and crying. When Max, his for-all-intents-and-purposes brother, goes over to him and sorts of poke at him and grooms his face and neck like they do, I start crying. When the baby goes over and sniffs at him like "hey, why aren't you playing with me? huh? huh?" I start crying all over again. It's been a big cryfest here. The thing is, I was prepared to put him down several years ago, when they said he had lymphoma and the success rate was very low, but then the chemo worked and thus we went down that path and he turned out fine. Of course I'll be ready to put him down now if the vet says he's just done with life, but I am very, very sad.
