With how many animals we have and how old they're getting, statistically we're doing better than we should be. We're also extremely lucky that hubby works for the shelter and they now have a public clinic, so when something happens it's not nearly as financially devastating as it would be at a regular vets, and they squeeze us in quick. I really would find individual homes for most of our cats if I could, but we ended up taking them originally because it had come down to us or euthanasia, and we've had them so long almost all are getting to the double digits and are seniors.
(Except for Gracie - she could have had a new home a hundred times over when she was a kitten two and a half years ago, but we had been attached to each other for so long that I couldn't let go. On one hand I feel guilty for keeping her when she didn't need it, but on the other I couldn't imagine life without her, she keeps me stable.)
Anyways, Midge is feeling okay tonight. Caught her eating dry food. Has not gotten any more yellow! She'll be 9 in April, and was in the last groups of foster kittens I had taken from the shelter. (As opposed to the cats we've stumbled across in the years since.) Out of 16 kittens, 2 stayed healthy and were adopted, 9 died - including Midge's brother and sister, and I kept the remaining 5 after the shelter rejected them for being too sickly. I had been doing subcutaneous fluids and force feeding three times a day for three straight months to keep them alive until they were able to recover. Thomasina (Seena) was put to sleep at age four because of constantly swollen and bleeding paw pads that made her completely lame and that would not resolve with any treatment (no vet could even tell us what was causing it), Penny never came out of anesthesia after a fluid filled mass formed in her abdomen that was the size of all her other organs combined (my vet had never lost an animal to anesthesia in 23 years, he was devastated - he had also never seen anything like that mass before and couldn't tell us what it was), and Clio had stomatitis and had all her teeth pulled and then died two and a half years ago - a week before Gracie came to us - from a collapsed lung lobe due to severe asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that would not respond to any medication. Elda is still alive and kicking even though she also has stomatitis like her sister Clio and goes through vomiting spells every few months (again, vets can't tell us why). Midge was always the healthy one, 8 and a half years without any issues whatsoever. It sadly makes perfect sense that she also would develop something autoimmune like every single of one her surviving fostermates did.
Here's our little jezebel. (Even though all our cats are fixed, Midge has always been extremely popular with the boys.
) They're all acting weird because she's acting weird! The whole house is in disarray with her not feeling well.
