Today was the conclusion of a completely miserable weekend.

Last week we noticed that Fancy Feet, one of our cats, wasn't really eating. If we gave her some canned food mixed with dry, she would eat a little bit. We thought she was just being finicky...you know, a cat. On Thursday she stopped eating almost altogether. If we gave her just canned food she would lick some of the juice, but that was it. We started measuring her consumption on Thursday. On Thursday and Friday combined she ate about half an ounce of food.

On Saturday morning we took her to Northwest Veterinary Specialists. She was really dehydrated and had a pre-existing heart murmur. She stayed there overnight with an IV to rehydrate. She continued to not eat. Neither my wife or I really slept at all Saturday night. I think we finally got to bed around 3:30AM. The anxiety of not knowing what was wrong with Fancy was just eating us up.

We brought her home on Sunday. We made a plan to take her to our regular vet on Monday for an abdominal ultrasound. Around 11:30PM she started breathing really heavily and in an odd manner. We took another trip to NWVS. They didn't find anything (new) wrong with her. An x-ray showed that her heart was quite abnormally shaped and her lymph nodes were enlarged. We finally got back home with Fancy around 3:00AM.

That brings us to today. "Giant pile of suck" doesn't even begin to cover it. We dropped her off out our regular vet as soon as they opened. We knew that they were going to have to fit her into their full schedule, so we wanted to get her there early. She was finally able to get a chest echo around noon and an abdominal ultrasound around 2:30. The ultrasound showed a number of unmistakable spots on her liver: cancer.

She had been really miserable for the last few days. Usually, no matter how agitated she was, if we pet her and kissed her on the top of the head enough she would eventually start purring. We hadn't been able to get her to purr since Saturday afternoon. The only thing left to do was make that horrible, painful choice that almost every pet owner has to make at some point.

We're going to miss her a lot.

That's Fancy on the left. The kitty on the right is Minnie.