I will always remember the day August 26th, 2010 because that was the day I met my Fur Baby Soulmate. My parents and I went to a shelter with the intention of adopting a kitten. Many of the kittens came up to me meowing and purring, one even kept biting my big toe. However, there was a single, unique kitten that stayed up on her perch, but curiously observed me from afar. As I approached her, she allowed me to pet her, and even pick her up without a fuss. I could tell how comforted she was by having me hold her. She was The One. It is both strange and amazing how you can just feel that it’s right. We took her home that day. The shelter had named her Roxy, but to me, she didn’t feel like a Roxy. I decided to name her Yoshi. My baby girl and I had an amazing time together. She never liked any of the normal cat toys; she only liked things that were long and thin, like a stick. She absolutely loved straws, and she would carry around her feather teaser in her mouth almost like a dog would a bone. Anywhere in the house I would go, she would follow and bring her toy with her. She was so funny – a three-pound kitten carrying around a stick longer than she was with the string and feathers trailing behind her.
Then it came time for me to move to California to be with my fiancé. She had to stay behind with my dad for a few months until we were able to get settled. Leaving her was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. She had loving parents during my absence, but it wasn’t like being with me. She was finally able to make the trip on an airplane with my dad in April of 2011. Their flight was delayed many times, and poor Yoshi, despite being offered litter and a private place to go, held it for nearly 12 hours. When I finally got to see her, she had gotten so big – about seven pounds now. She was almost a full-grown cat. We were living in a very small studio apartment when she arrived. It was only 500 square feet, but at least we had each other. My fiancé formed an instant bond with her, which made me very happy. He would get home from work earlier than I would, and he loved to play with her for hours until I got home. We also discovered Tuna Flakes, which were her favorite treat.
In the middle of July, my fiancé got a better job about an hour and a half south of our tiny studio apartment. We moved again, but at least this time I didn’t have to be apart from my Yoshi during the process. Our new apartment, the one I am writing from at this very moment, is twice as big as our other apartment. She was much happier here because she had much more room to roam around and hide and play. We even got her a special cat perch for the windowsill. That was always her favorite spot in the house because it always had a little bit of sun to warm her, and she loved to watch the birds fly back and forth outside. She never had any desire to go outside, though. Anytime we had to leave the apartment to get her to the car for any reason, she greatly disliked being outdoors.
On Saturday, November 12th, 2011, we noticed that she was very lethargic and would not eat anything other than her tuna flake treats. We decided to observe her for a bit and to give her a bath because her fur was not looking its best. After the bath, while I was drying her off, she leaped out of my arms, went to the middle of the floor, and urinated right in front of us. We both knew at that moment that something was very wrong because this was a cat that had never had an accident in her whole life. I immediately rushed her to the nearest animal hospital that I could find that was open on Saturdays. With her only symptoms being lethargy, spontaneous urination, and refusing solid food, they had no way of narrowing it down to any specific disease. They took a sample of her blood, gave me an antibiotic (just in case), and said they would call me the next day with the results. I went home with her that night thinking that it was probably just a urinary tract infection, and that she would be fine once she finished her antibiotics. The phone call I received the next day said it was definitely not a UTI, but something much worse. Out of all of the things they tested in her blood, about 5 things were in a normal range out of 2 pages worth of numbers. Her red blood cell count was very low, which was the most troubling. They wanted to re-test her blood to make sure that these numbers were correct because of how bad it was. The numbers were correct. She spent Sunday night in an Urgent Care clinic and received a blood transfusion. Her red blood cell count was so low that should she have had any stress, she would have suffocated due to a lack of oxygen being carried to her organs. She spiked a fever that night and again in the morning. They wouldn’t even let me take her until the very last minute before they closed to make sure that our vet’s office would be open by the time I got her there.
On Monday, we still did not know what was wrong with her, so she had some more tests run. Fortunately, she was stable enough for an ultrasound and a couple of biopsies. The doctor also ran tests for cancer and various infections. She had a good chance of survival if it was an infection, but only about 6 months to live if it was cancer – we hoped for an infection. She went home with the vet that night because she was stable enough to not need critical care, but sick enough to still need a professional to watch over her.
The next day, all of the infection tests came back except for one. They were all negative. I hoped that even though our chances were low for an infection that the last one would be positive. It was. She had a bacterial infection called mycoplasmosis. It is a type of bacteria that does not have a cell wall, so it requires a living host to survive. It attaches to the red blood cells, which makes the immune system think that the red blood cells are foreign bodies, so it attacks them and kills them. They are then filtered through the spleen, but since there are so many, the spleen becomes enlarged. Because this bacteria made her feel so ill, she had stopped eating, which caused something called lipidosis in her liver. What happens with lipidosis is that when a cat stops eating, even just for a couple of days, their body starts to break down the stored fat, which has to get processed in the liver. Cats’ livers are not able to process fat in this way for an extended period of time, and can get inundated with these fat cells. The only way to reverse this is to get your cat to start eating again, as long as you’ve caught it in time. With this diagnosis, the doctor gave Yoshi about an 80% chance of survival. I was very hopeful for her.
Yoshi was able to come home with us Tuesday night, but we had to bring her back to the vet the following day so that they could continue to keep an eye on her. They had surgically inserted a feeding tube into her neck since she still was refusing to eat. We were told that with the infection and all of the antibiotics she was on that this could cause some nausea, which would explain why she did not want to eat. She was also still not well enough to use the litter box, so we purchased a large dog crate and some puppy training pads. This way, she could be very comfortable, but also not make a mess. We tried offering her some of her favorite wet food and tuna flakes, but the only thing she wanted was water. I spent the night on the couch that night so that I could be near her. I hoped that she would be able to feel how much I love her to motivate her to stay strong and fight this infection.
Wednesday felt very different from the other days. I realized that I had left my phone at home after dropping Yoshi off that morning, and the vet had no way of contacting me. My first instinct was to rush to the nearest drug store to purchase one of those pay-as-you-go phones. I had no idea that you had to wait for them to be activated, and to this day, it still has not been activated. Once I got to work (30 minutes late due to the phone) I immediately sent emails to my fiancé and my dad, thinking one of them has to see it. Luckily my dad responded quickly and was able to contact the vet to let them know that they should call him if we were to receive any news that day. When he called, they had received the kidney biopsy result, which was cancer-free. There was only one more test left to go to be sure she did not have any cancer at all, but we would have to wait a few more days for that one. They said that they would teach me how to give her food and medicine through the feeding tube when I came that night because I would be taking her home since she was doing so much better. There was no more news for the rest of the day.
When I went to pick Yoshi up that night, they brought me into an exam room where I thought they would be teaching me how to feed her. Instead, the vet came in alone to give me some not so good news. Yoshi’s red blood cell count had dropped again, and she would be needing another transfusion that night. She said that this time they would be giving her two units instead of just one like they had done before. I asked why this could have happened and what her chances of survival looked like now. She said that it wasn’t unusual for an animal to need multiple transfusions before their system starts turning around. She told me about another dog that was there who had three transfusions, and it took him about a week and a half to recover. She also said that if the infection had gotten into her bone marrow, her chances of making a full recovery would not be as good.
I made a quick stop at home to grab my phone before rushing her to the Urgent Care clinic. They immediately started treating Yoshi once I got her there. The doctor came in to talk to me about her condition. I wanted to know if she had ever seen anything like this before and what the outcome was. She said in her 10+ years of being a vet, she had only seen this bacteria three times, but never in combination with the lipidosis. She wouldn’t really give me a straight answer and just told me to go along with what the vet said. The technician came back in and asked me if I would like to say goodnight to Yoshi before I left, and without hesitation I said yes. They brought me into the back room where Yoshi was laying on a heating blanket with warm air circulating inside of it. I started petting her and she began making these angry meow noises. My first thought was that she was getting angry at me for making her go through all this treatment, but then she started heaving and vomited across the floor. They moved her to a new cage, but she vomited again. This made me very uneasy to leave her, but I knew that they needed to get the treatments going if they were going to make her better. They also gave her some anti nausea medications to help with the vomiting. I went home with my fiancé and we had dinner and I went to bed early that night because I was just physically and emotionally exhausted.
About half an hour later, at 10:15, I got a phone call from the Urgent Care clinic saying that Yoshi had vomited during the transfusion and probably had inhaled some of it. Her heart was still beating, but she was not breathing on her own. Her pupils were fixed and dilated, and she was not responding to anything. They asked me right then and there on the phone if I wanted to stop with treatment, and I said no, let me call you back in a minute, just keep her stable. I told my fiancé what had happened and we both broke down, but immediately began getting dressed because we knew we had to get down there as quickly as possible. I called the clinic back to tell them we were on our way and to try to keep her alive and stable until we got there. They weren’t sure at that point if they would be able to keep her alive. Once we got there, we were put in the same exam room as the first time we had brought her there. The vet did not give her a very good chance of pulling through this, just 1 in 5. They asked us if we would like to stop treatment at that time. It was a very difficult decision and we talked about it for what seemed like an eternity. I went in the back to see what kind of condition Yoshi was in. Her pupils had gone back to normal and she had started breathing on her own. It seemed like she was coming back to us. I got my fiancé to come back there with me because I knew he would regret it if he didn’t get a chance to see her alive again. I also wanted her to know that we were both there and we love her very much. We could see her heart beat on a monitor up on the wall, and when we would pet her, we could see that it would get excited so she knew it was us. We went back in the exam room and we just couldn’t bring ourselves to put her to sleep. She seemed like she was trying to come back to us. Then a technician came in to talk with us about what we were thinking. Another technician rushed in shortly after saying that Yoshi’s heart had stopped. We decided that it was her sign of telling us she couldn’t make it anymore, and we decided to stop. It was the hardest thing we ever had to do, but I am thankful that she waited for us to be there with her. I still can’t believe that she was so young and had to die. They brought her body in the exam room so that we would have some time alone with her to say goodbye. She looked so peaceful. I miss her very much and I wish that things could have gone differently. I just don’t understand why it was her time, at only a year and a half. She was just a baby. My little baby girl. I still love her with all my heart and will always love her forever. I just hope that she knows that.