Keeping up with Fred-n-Sara

Last night sometime one of our cats, well, originally my cat, Casper passed away.  He had been sick for a while, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise, but that doesn’t mean it hurt any less.

He had been prone to UTIs since Calvin was born.  The stress of the new babies, we thought, triggered these, but it may have been something more.  In late November he got his 3rd UTI and the vet told us that we should switch his food to support a healthier urinary tract as well as overall lifestyle for him and our other two cats.  Well, Casper, who has never been a picky eater, didn’t like the new prescription food.  He went on a hunger strike and tried to eat anything else he could, including dog food and table scraps (thanks to Calvin, he was able to keep this up for a little while).  Then he just stopped eating all together.  By Christmas we noticed that he was losing a considerable amount of weight, and still wasn’t eating the new cat food, so we switched back over to the food we had been feeding the cats before.  We thought that fixed the problem and he’d start gaining weight back.  Well, we were wrong.  He never started eating again.  And he started urinating in different spots around the house.  So back to the vet, who gave us more antibiotics for his UTI.  But that didn’t fix the problem.

Last weekend I noticed that he had become really yellow under his black coat.  So after some googling, I found that he probably had liver failure from not eating for so long.  So Fred takes him back to the vet who tells us that this isn’t the end for my 5 year old cat; he could insert a feeding tube into his stomach and we could force feed him back to health.  He told us the procedure had an 85% survival rate.  We took a day to think it over, because with 2 small children, tube feeding a cat every 3 hours or so is not easy.  But in the end, we couldn’t not try, this is my Casper, the feistiest black cat known to man!  Unfortunately, we can’t add him to the 85% of cats who survive and thrive after liver failure.  He died sometime last night, 1/29/10.

So here’s a few pictures that I found today that made me remember all the good times

He loved his pink string and his “jungle.”

He loved Nina (sometimes) and the babies, even if they were loud!

But most of all, I think he loved being close to the action, he never missed anything!

He will be missed very much.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Cats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.