RIP One Lucky Baby

After an initial rally, One Lucky Baby continued to deteriorate after we brought her home from the animal hospital a few weeks ago. Tonight we made the difficult decision to put her down. We're sad...

Kitty Update, of sorts...

Well, $1600 later, we brought Lucky Baby home today. What did we get for our $1600? Well, she's been on iv fluids for a week and been getting round the clock care. We don't have a diagnosis, but suspect cancer. (The hepatic lipodosis they thought it was turned out to be a best case scenario diagnosis.) They wanted to run more and more tests and we said, "No". She's had enough: enough blood tests, enough fur shaved off, enough needles. I guess now we just wait. We wait to see if the guess is wrong and it isn't cancer and she bounces back or wait for signs she's declining and wonder how long it will be before we have to head back to the pet hospital to put her down.


We're all sad, but resigned...we've done all we can do for her. Honestly, even though it will take us a while to recover from the expenditure, the time it gave us has helped the children understand the immense responsibility that is pet ownership. It is so much more than being able to buy the food each month...it is having to make the really hard decisions about what is best for the animal, even when your heart aches.

Thanks for listening...I know to some people it is no big deal and I can appreciate that, but for all of us, it has been really difficult.

One Lucky Baby and Difficult Decisions

One Lucky Baby was found in our backyard, frozen and starved in December 2005. We really didn't think she was going to pull through, she was so thin. I guess we found her in the nick of time because she did pull through. She's a tiny little thing even though she's about six years old. She's our only house cat, by her choice. She just prefers to stay inside or on the deck. She's just one of those cats that is always around, but not a big deal.


She never liked Tuck because he bugged her constantly. I thought she'd be the only one thrilled that he's left. It didn't turn out that way. I guess all the stress of the past few weeks has caught up with her because she's very sick. We came home from our trip Sunday night and she was super, scary thin. Since I got her to eat numerous times during the day, I thought we'd be okay and she'd be fine, but she wouldn't eat this morning and would barely drink, so off to the vet we went. Bad news: They think Lucky has stress induced liver failure (there is some complicated name for it, but that is the gist of it). So, she's hooked up to i.v. fluids and having a battery of tests run and tomorrow, after the results come in, we'll know our next step. It sounds stupid, but these tests and this 24 hour period are going to cost $1200 and I agonized over what to do. We don't have $1200 lying around. We went forward anyway. Why do them? Because how can I tell my children we didn't give her a fighting chance? If she has cancer or cat hepatitis or a host of any other things, we'll have to put her down, but if she doesn't, we'll try to save her.


What else could I do? What would you do?

P.S. I'm not having a good day.