42 Days Later ...

IMG_1863.JPG, originally uploaded by Mnemosyne_LA.

You may have noticed that blogging suddenly ceased. Here's the timeline:

About six weeks ago, I noticed on a Sunday night that Boris (he's the gray one) was extremely lethargic and seemed very, very ill. I packed him up and took him to the emergency vet, worried that he was having another recurrence of Feline Urinary Syndrome (where his urethra gets blocked).

The vet had much worse news for us -- not only were his kidney values off the charts, but his heart was arrhythmic. Our two choices were to check him into the hospital for a week-long regime of intravenous fluids while being hooked up to a heart monitor, or to take him home and make him comfortable.

Boris is 14. I've had him since he was a four-month-old kitten. We couldn't, in good conscience, put him through that at his age. So we took him home.

We had him rechecked by our regular vet the next day, and they had the same kidney results, though the arrhythmia had cleared up with the subcutaneous fluids they gave him at the emergency vet. (In retrospect, the arrhythmia she heard was probably due to dehydration, but we were too panicky to realize that at the time.) They gave us a bag of subcutaneous fluids for us to administer ourselves, a cream to increase his appetite, and sent us home so we could wait for him to die.

We took him home and we waited.

And we waited.

We're still waiting.

Not only is he still alive six weeks after he went into acute kidney failure, he seems to be feeling a little better than he did six weeks ago. He finally started eating again on a semi-regular basis last week (no more force-feeding -- whoo-hoo!). A couple of days ago, he decided that my knitting needles were his personal play toys.

So now we don't know what the hell to think, and neither does our vet. His tests show that he has very little kidney function, but he seems to have decided that kidneys are for OTHER cats, not for him.

In other words: the crisis is over. I will be posting a memorial to him someday, but not quite yet. Soon, but not yet. And I can get back to blogging now that I don't have to worry every single day that he's going to die the very same day that I post a cheerful knitting picture.

Oh, crap, I just jinxed us, didn't I?