I took this picture last Saturday. On Tuesday night she was clearly not feeling well so we took her to the emergency vet. They told us that she was severely dehydrated. They did an x-ray and a blood test. They told us that her kidneys were in bad shape.
We left her there at the vet where they put her on i.v. fluids and started a low-protein diet. We’ve been visiting her daily. She has been much better each day. Most of that is just because she’s hydrated again.
On Saturday, they will do another blood test and we’ll get our first idea of how bad the kidney problem really is.
We were pretty devastated when we first heard the news. Alice is only 10 years old and we thought we had a while before we would have to deal with major health issues. We did some reading (primarily on http://www.felinecrf.com/) and have some idea what her ongoing care is likely to entail. We’re just doing the one-day-at-a-time thing and hoping for the best at this point.
I’m planning to start blogging the details here so our family and friends can check on her status and progress (and so I don’t have to spam them ;-). I’ve got some other backlog to get up so it won’t be all Alice all the time here at Mad Times, but the cat content is going to increase for a while.