About a cat
(I’m just going to get this out right away: Abby is fine right now.)
Abby is 15 1/2 years old. She has arthritis in one of her paws, she’s getting skinnier, and she’s right on the cusp on having kidney disease. Last summer, after her stomach got upset from some medication she was taking for a UTI, she went about 3 days without eating while puking everything (including water) right back up. We thought that was the end for her. It wasn’t.
Last Sunday, she came over to her scratching post, so I played with her and brushed her for awhile. Jason and I left to run some errands and when we came back an hour or so later, we found five Beanie Babies that Abby had dragged up the stairs to welcome us home.
Sometime between noon and 3:00 p.m., something happened. She threw up. Then again. And again and again. Mostly it was clear, sometimes frothy, sometimes pink. At some point, we covered all of our furniture with beach towels.
She wasn’t eating. She didn’t eat the rest of Sunday. Her meows were hoarse. She was hiding in corners and we were afraid she was going to die.
Monday was no better. She was sleeping, not eating or drinking, not walking around. I worried so much about her during the day that I gave myself either an ulcer or developed the worst case of heartburn known to man. At lunchtime, I was beside myself. Even though I knew driving home to check on her would take longer than the hour I had for lunch, I did it.
I drove as fast as I dared, and with every mile bringing me closer to home, I felt more and more anxious. By the time I arrived home armed with yogurt and baby food and wet food to try to entice her to eat, I was near panic. I felt in my soul that I was going to open the door only to find Abby lying dead somewhere.
She was in her cat bed. I bent over her and as she opened her eyes, I burst into tears. “Hi sweetie,” I said, stroking that silky spot behind her ear that always reminds me of rabbit fur. “Are you hungry?”
I banished Sunny to the bathroom, where she pounded angrily on the door, and laid out a smorgasboard of food: dry food, wet food, baby food, yogurt. Abby sniffed at each, in some cases practically touching her nose to it, but wouldn’t eat. I rubbed some on her chin and she wouldn’t even lick it off.
It’s only been a day, I reminded myself. She’ll come out of it. She has before. But this time it felt different. It felt final.
She didn’t eat anything on Monday, but she did finally drink. We were so overjoyed we let her drink all she wanted. She immediately went on our bed (the only piece of furniture not covered with a towel) and puked it all up. I cried myself to sleep that night. I tried to imagine a life coming home from work and not seeing her greet me, of sleeping in a bed where she wasn’t cuddled up next to me. I cried some more.
She didn’t eat on Tuesday, although she did lick some maple syrup from my finger. When Jason got home from work, he called and reported that Abby didn’t eat. I called our vet to see if we could bring her in the next morning. They said no, but they could see us in 40 minutes. So I left work early and rushed home.
Besides the fact that she wasn’t eating, Abby’s attitude was almost normal. She was using the litterbox and drinking and walking around and jumping up on the bed and the bathroom counter, and everything about her looked better, but not 100%. But she wouldn’t eat.
The vet ran the same blood test Abby had just a few months ago and said everything looked normal except that she was dehydrated. So she had to get sub-Q fluids.
Then we were told that if she didn’t start eating that night or the next morning, we’d have to give her sub-Q fluids. Which involves an IV bag and precision and a cat who will let you stab her with a needle.
We watched the procedure carefully, asking questions and hoping against hope we wouldn’t have to do it ourselves. We were sent home with a bag of fluid, extra needles, lengths of tubing. The vet also told us we’d have to force feed her if she didn’t start eating. And then he casually mentioned the one possibility I wondered about: she might have excess stomach acid, so we should give her 1/2 a tablet of Pepcid AC twice a day. Since she wouldn’t eat, and she can regurgitate any pill you force down her throat, we had NO IDEA how we could make this happen.
We brought back home a quiet cat with a giant fluid bubble on one side that took awhile to disappear (which meant she wasn’t super dehydrated). She didn’t eat that night. But she seemed to feel better and walked around with more pep. I was outside with Shorty that night when a light came on downstairs and I saw Jason leaning over Abby and giving her a kiss on the top of her head.
Yesterday, I spent my breaks writing down notes on how to give fluids, even printing out a step-by-step tutorial with photos. I felt confident that I could do it. I also researched stomach acid. Abby had almost 3/4 of the symptoms. I felt better about her, more hopeful that it was stomach acid and not some insiduous disease we were unaware that she had.
I stopped at Walgreen’s on my lunch hour to pick up Pepcid AC, a syringe to force feed her that night after we gave her the fluids, and some Fancy Feast, bringing our cat food can total (usually zero) to 8.
At 4:30, my work phone rang.
“Hi,” said Jason, sounding exactly like a sad-sack Ross from Friends.
Oh God, I thought. This is it. She’s dead.
“I just got home,” Jason continued in that same sad voice.
I couldn’t say anything.
“Abby’s EATING!”
It was so completely unexpected that I didn’t understand.
“What?”
“She’s eating!”
After momentarily wanting to throttle him (“Don’t ever do that again! You scared me!”), I felt such an immense, cautious relief. She ate really well for Jason, then ate OK right before bed. This morning she had about 3/4 of what she normally does, and when I went downstairs to say goodbye to her before I left for work, I saw a Beanie Baby dragged halfway across the living room carpet.
I hope she’s back to normal now and that this is an isolated (and treatable) incident and not the beginning of the end, because I realize I can’t live without her yet.
