Monday, September 19, 2011

A little bit of seriousness about our cat, Mattie


Our cat, Mattie, is 11 years old.  She was diagnosed with renal failure (aka kidney failure) a few months ago.  We changed her food and that didn’t help.  We started giving her fluids via an IV, 3 times a week.  And according to her last blood test, that hasn’t helped either.   Her vet has instructed us to give her fluids daily now.  Bobby and I just had a talk about what our next steps should be.  There is no cure for renal failure so what we do for her now is just prolonging her life.  So far, she seems pretty happy and comfortable.  There are days when we don’t see her at all.  But just tonight, she was meowing at us and hanging out.  (BTW, she sleeps downstairs in our guest room from morning to evening, when the boys are awake and once they’re asleep, she comes upstairs to be with me and Bobby.)  We discussed our budget and, luckily, we should be able to keep this up for a while.  But if her fluids get increased again, we will probably have to put her down.  There’s a part of me that wants to put her down soon.  I don’t want her to suffer.  And I want her to “fall asleep” while she still feels like herself.  But I don’t want to put her down early either.  We’re going to see how it goes over the next 2 weeks.  We start her daily fluids tonight.  We also talked about our inevitable discussion with our boys about why she isn’t with us anymore.  She is the only pet they’ve ever known.  I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. 

1 comment:

  1. Mattie will always be my babygirl! We had her before the boys and I still remember when we got her, it was a choice between her and this black cat that I was going to name Trinity (after the Matrix), but then you pointed out that Mattie had a beauty mole like Cindy Crawford. So of course we had to adopt Mattie.

    And we named her after Natilie Portman's character in the "Professional", Mathilda.

    Mattie is still here, so we will enjoy all the time we have left with her!

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