Sunday, May 13
So. To my sadness I was right about Delancey: her kidneys are failing. The vet gave me three options: spend two or three thousand dollars on hospitalization and repeated dialysis to have a 50% chance of curing her if it was an acute case brought on by poison, and a 50% chance of revealing that it was chronic which would mean home care. Option two was Chinese children and I'm not hearing that just yet. Option 3 was to go directly to the home care, and that's what we're doing. In hindsight it's pretty obvious that this has been coming on for a while and is a chronic condition. Apparently cats can get by with a small percentge of their kidney function and they don't really decline until they hit like 30% which is where I guess she is now. So the object is to help her stay comfortable and hydrated.
Crying my eyes out didn't help, so I turned to the Internet since I was kind of unclear on what the vet had said. I have to give her a quarter of a Pepcid AC every morning, and squirt some Maalox-type liquid in her mouth twice a day before meals to bind the phosphorous in her food. I also have to (L.S. do not read)
give her subcutaneous fluid every other day, 150 ml from a big squishy liter bag which I have to hang up and stick her with a great big needle and then fill her up with fluid. It makes a big bulge under her shoulders which then moves around to her chest or legs before it absorbs.
So that's me for the next little while. She won't drink water or eat much, and I'm hoping that will change. I dipped up a bowl of rainwater and she drank a bunch of that so I put a bunch of philodendron cuttings in a mug of water and I'll leave that in a sunny spot on the kitchen floor in the hopes that as they root and the water gets funky she will be interested in that too. I'll also have a bucket out to catch any rainwater we get from now on.
A sympathetic older lady sitting next to me at the vet's office told me that in the middle of her life she'd stopped having pets because she couldn't bear the pain of losing them. But now that she was older she had changed her mind, because the love was worth it. I hope she's right.
12:24 PM
