so, erin and i went to see my parents over the weekend and came back here on tuesday. when we came back, we found frida, one of our 3 cats, was very sick. we talked to meara, erin’s sister who’d been feeding them, and she said that frida hadn’t eaten in what would be 3 days the night we got back…we tried to feed the cats, but frida wouldn’t eat. the other two seemed fine. we thought maybe she just caught something somehow, but that didn’t make a whole lot of sense since neither of the other two cats were sick at all…
so we’re going nuts. i run out to get some wet food for frida and we try to feed her that, but she won’t eat. so erin dilutes it with some water and uses a dropper to hand feed frida — she seems to take that okay, and seems to be doing a tad better after cleaning her up a bit. panic mode subsides and we figure she’ll be good, we just may need to hand feed her for a while until she gets better.
the next day is wednesday, my first day back to work, but i’ve already decided i’m working from home because there’s too much crap to do with the just getting back and now frida stuff. in the morning she looks worse than the night before and now she’s not eating. we’re back in panic mode again. there’s a vet up the street so i walk down the block to see the name and look up the phone number online. i call to see if they accept walk-ins or if we need to make an appt. and the doc isn’t in on wednesdays but we could definitely walk in thursday or friday. i ask if there’s any other vets in the neighborhood that might be open and he says “well what’s wrong?” so i explain that frida hasn’t eaten in now 4 days and looks horrible. he says “well i’m here now, can you bring her in right now?” so we get our shit together and go.
he looks at her and i am off distracting gavin with the big yellow lab, orange tabby and big parrot all of which gavin is very excited about, while erin talks to the doc. he does a quick check and says he thinks it’s probably her kidneys and generally that type of stuff is congenital, there’s nothing we could have really done to prevent it, cats are just prone to kidney problems. he will run a blood test that will get back in an hr and call us. in the meantime, frida stays at the clinic. he gave us a range of numbers, x is normal, y is bad, z he would normally recommend euthanasia, and xx is the highest he’s ever seen.
when he calls us back an hr later, he talks to erin and says that frida set a record. her toxicity levels were almost 2x higher than the xx number he gave us. so we run down there and say goodbye……..
we cried a lot and when this stuff started going down, i told my work i would not be able to do the work from home thing, and just made it a personal day. it’s still painful to think about, but we’re both much more able to deal with it now. it’s sad. frida was the first cat we took home, our first foster, we nursed her to health when she was a kitten and she used to just curl up on my chest and purr because she was too sick and weak to do much else and i just couldn’t bear to give her back to the humane society. now she’s gone and she was only 5 yrs old. /sigh.
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