sad cats

if you've spoken to any of use recently, you'll know this one all consuming and horrible thing that has stopped us in our tracks: our kitties are sick. like, super sick. dying, probably, all of a sudden. it's been pretty awful, thanks for asking.

here is what we know: aretha lost weight, stopped eating, looked really gross and lethargic while we were away on our roadtrip. ben continued to be a healthy gleaming glowing free roaming rabbit killing machine. 

we took aretha to the vet a few weeks ago, after she continued to refuse to eat or drink or look lively in any way, and the vet found her to be in kidney failure, to have lost a significant amount of weight, and suggested that it all looked like a toxicity (nibbling on a house plant, maybe, although we have no evidence for this) or lymphoma. they set us up with medication to make her more comfortable, medication to increase her appetite, and a bag and tubing for injecting fluid under her skin every day to get her hydrated. 

she has been so stinky, stopped grooming herself, and so she's also had a few baths in the last 2 months. she's been too weak to fight. 

so we've been doing that every few days and she's really perked up. i moved every single house plant out of reach, and we didn't pursue any imaging to confirm lymphoma. now we just have to wonder: is it our interventions that are making her better, or is getting better on her own? will she just regress when we stop? she hasn't really started eating again, so it all feels very tenuous. 

she started drinking lake water again, so i don't know if that's a good sign or the source of all our troubles. 

she also sits on david's laptop keyboard all.day.long. 

but then about a month ago, i was petting ben, who was looking lethargic himself, and found some big firm masses under his skin along his ribs on both sides of his chest, and firm masses in his flanks near his spine. we started watching him closely and discovered that he is hardly eating, hardly going to the bathroom, hardly drinking, and his hunting suddenly ceased. 

so it was off to the vet for this poor boy, who usually gets a little premedication for sedation so he doesn't injure or kill a veterinarian at his visits. i gave him his usual premedication gabapentin dose, and so completely snowed him that he couldn't walk for a full 24 hours without tipping over after that. truthfully, he's never returned to his normal self since that gabapentin. ANYWAY, at the vet, we learned:

• those are his super enlarged firm kidneys that we are feeling as masses on his back
• those are big over sized firm lymph nodes in his chest, and there are lots more big ones every where else
• and his kidneys seem to be failing too

the vet thought he too likely had lymphoma, took a biopsy of one of the lymph nodes, and that confirmed it. he doesn't have the viral infections FLV or FIV that might cause this, so what is up?

so what do we make of the fact that both our cats, since moving, suddenly have developed the same cancer? are they the canaries in the coal mine? is the house toxic? is a neighbor poisoning them either directly because they hate cats (look it up: this happens), or indireclty because of a pesticide they're using? or did the stress of the move suddenly allow a compromised immune system to lose the battle against the growing cancer? is it all just....a coincidence? why is one cat getting better and the other getting so much sicker by the day?

we were advised to get an oncologist's opinion, so i spent 4 hours doing that this week, and she couldn't solve the mystery (and didn't seem too intrigued by the 2 cat/same diagnosis mystery) but did offer us a very stressful and shockingly expensive and labor intensive chemotherapy regimen for ben. we said no thank you, and have instead been giving him fluids to keep him hydrated. we also started some steroids in the hope that it would stimulate his appetite, give him some energy, and maybe shrink some of the cancer masses that seem to be getting in the way of swallowing and being comfortable. 

sadly, nothing is working and he's getting sicker every day. 

i don't think he's going to be with us much longer, and it really breaks my heart.

i mean, don't get me wrong: this cat has been an utter pain in the ass for 13 years, tearing up our books, knocking over lamps at 3 am to get our attention, peeing on our furniture, yowling loudly, sneaking out, shaming us by being an insufferable outdoor man-about-town, and leaving dead rabbits in pools of blood on our back steps. 

but he is also a great love, a solid companion, who purrs at the slightest touch, likes to be carried like a baby (by a select pair of people--namely me and david), and has always seemed aware of his surroundings like a human member of the family. his loss will be felt deeply by my and david and our children. and some neighbors. 

he's the best cat i've ever known.