When it rains it pours.

After my last post, I hate to write another bad news post but we really are having a string of bad luck at work. This time it's our other clinic cat "Babe". She's pretty sick and has to spend the night at a critical care hospital.

Babe was another cat that was brought into our clinic to be euthanized. Unlike Merlin though Babe was completely healthy, just extremely overweight (an 8 pound cat in a 14 pound body). The man who brought her in said that she had belonged to his mother but she had just moved overseas and left Babe with him, and he really didn't want to have a cat. Since Babe was 14, he didn't think he could find a home for her and thought he should put her down instead. Wendy of course refused to euthanasia a healthy animal and took her in with the intent of re-homing her once we cleaned her teeth and got some weight off her.

It became apparent within the first week we had her, that she was going nowhere. We all instantly fell in love with her and none of us were willing to part with her. Even Merlin liked her which was surprising since Merlin hated all the other clinic cats we'd had.

None of us could understand why Babe's owner didn't want her anymore as she didn't really do a whole lot except eat and sleep, and she was the most loving cat we'd ever met. Any time anyone's lap became available she would park herself in it and fall asleep purring. She let you pretty much do anything to her and you could flip her on her back with her legs in the air and she would fall asleep purring. She was a lot shier than Merlin, and it took awhile for her to venture up front to meet people, but when she did they thought she was fabulous.

It's been almost a year now since we adopted her. She is down to a reasonable weight and though she has gone completely deaf, she has otherwise remained relatively healthy. We laugh at her a lot as she's actually quite dim and she always has this really vacant look on her face, but she is so loving and sweet everyone who meets her just adores her.

She and Merlin had been having some on/off troubles with respiratory problems and despite numerous cultures sent to the lab we haven't been able find out what was wrong with them. The also both developed ear infections recently which, though quite common in dogs, is quite unusual in cats.

Babe improved drastically on antibiotics and we thought she was on the road to recovery, but over the week-end her symptoms returned despite her continued antibiotics. She started sneezing, had a runny nose and within the last 24 hours her symptoms worsened. She didn't eat her dinner last night and this morning her nose was so caked with green ooze that her little nostrils were completely sealed shut and she had to breathe through her mouth. When we cleaned her nose off and unsealed it all this green discharge started oozing out. Upon further examination we noticed one of her pupils was really small and the other was super dilated.

Chest x-rays were inconclusive so we sent blood to the lab. Though we're still waiting for a few more results to come in tomorrow, her preliminary report showed her white blood cell count was through the roof (not good). In addition she had a very high temperature and seemed to be getting more and more depressed as the day went on so we decided to send her over to critical care to see a specialist.

We're worried that Babe and Merlin both somehow contracted Crypto (this would cause the respiratory infection and also could have led to both Merlin's abdominal mass and her rapid deterioration in health). Fingers crossed Babe doesn't have it though as it is very difficult to treat and the drugs used to treat it could cause damage to her liver.

Babe will be spending the night at critical care on fluids under the supervision of several specialists, and hopefully she can come back to our clinic tomorrow. None of us are willing to let her go, especially not with the loss of Merlin still fresh in our minds. Babe has to make it, we love her too much.

Edit: Monday November 13th - Babe didn't make it. We tried so hard to save her but by this morning her body was just shutting down and we had to make the difficult decision to let her go. We're heartbroken. The loss of two loved animals in such a short time span is so hard! I can't beleve she's never going to come running up to me again to hop into my lap. I miss her so much already.