My kitty isn’t diabetic, and that’s left me frustrated, angry, sad, and more than a little scared. I noticed that MaggieMoo was losing a lot of weight, even though her appetite hasn’t changed. She hasn’t seemed ill in any way, but she’s been drinking a bit more than usual. Habitually chubby kitty, drinking a lot, eating a lot, losing weight…diabetes is my first guess. So I take her to work to run some tests on her tonight.
The good news is that Moo won’t have to have regular blood draws and daily injections. The bad news is that we haven’t a clue what’s wrong with her. Her chem panel is perfectly normal. So is her physical exam. So is her urinalysis. Radiographs show nothing but that she’s full of shit…so full that you can’t see anything in her abdomen but feces. Right now, we’ve got nothing to work with.
Maybe it’s just the effects of working with doomed animals all the time, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s something very much Not Good. My head keeps telling me she could just be hyperthyroid (we’ve sent a panel out, but it’ll take a few days to come back). My gut, though…my gut tells me that my little moo-kitty will be going to that big litterbox in the sky before long. Either her combo test will come back positive this time, or the internists will tell me she’s got some horrible disease that we can’t treat effectively. Or the treatment will be really awful for her to endure, or we won’t be able to afford it.
I don’t know, maybe I’d feel better about her chances if the last week hadn’t been such a parade of death. I still wish she had something easy like diabetes, though.
Well, shit. She’s not hyperthyroid, and her combo test is still negative. I guess I’ll repeat the films after fasting her, and have one of the internists do an ultrasound. If those don’t show anything, I don’t know where we go from there. They’ll probably suggest biopsies, but I’m not sure I want to put her through that.
It’s frustrating enough when it’s a patient you’re completely stumped about. When it’s your own kitty, though, it’s just hell. It makes me feel powerless, like I’ve failed her. It’s my responsibility to take care of her, to help her, not just because I’m her person, but because that’s what I do. I pour so much into taking care of other people’s sick and injured pets; it just rips my heart open to have to stand by and watch Moo melt away and not even have the first idea of how to help her, or even how to figure out how to help her.
It doesn’t help that I know mystery cases like this usually take one of two courses: we figure out that the animal has something horrible and it either dies or is euthanized, or we run every test in the book and never figure out what’s wrong and the animal dies or is euthanized. Once in a while we get to pull off a spectacular miracle cure, but that’s incredibly rare. As much as I want to pretend it’s not true, the sad, brutal fact of the matter is that we’re going to have to make a lot of hard choices in the near future.
Add on the fact that my dad had a mild stroke yesterday, and I’m about to climb the walls. He’s fine, he’s almost completely back to normal already, but he’s going to be in the hospital for a few days for monitoring. Even though there’s nothing I could do there but stand around, it chafes at me that I can’t go home for a bit. My parents have, in fact, forbidden me to come home over something so paltry. I know he’s fine, and he’s going to continue to be fine, and there’s nothing to be accomplished by being there, but the distance still stresses me.
Nothing constructive to add but I wanted to wish you the best. Its frustrating when someone (furry or human) in our lives is sick and there’s nothing you can do. I hope kitty ends up with something easy to treat and it sounds like dad’s doing well. hugs
{{Hugs}} and good wishes to you and Moo, CrazyCatLady. I hope you’re able to find out what’s wrong and take care of it. And godspeed for your father’s recovery. Try not to forget to take care of yourself, too, and get as much rest as you can.