My 14 yr old cat has been refusing food & drink since Thursday, vomiting, incontinent. On Friday, vet did blood tests & found blocked anal glands, which he took care of. No other obvious diagnoses or red flags. I made an appt to have her put down today. Now she is perking up. Took a little water but no food, walking around. Am still going to take her in & find out if I misjudged the situation.

This is her normal face. She looks crabby all the time.

Tried to clean her butt from diarrhea but she complained. This is really hard. She was so out of it all weekend, we thought her time had come and she would pass in her sleep.

The vet wants to do take x-rays & try symptomatic relief before putting her down. If she's still refusing food on Wednesday, that'd be the signal to let her go.

Two vet visits + tests, x-rays, prescriptions, $1100 on the Visa card.

On the other hand, my vet calls her patients her babies, which is endearing.

Pretty exhausted from the anticipated loss of my cat, the vet-assisted rebound, the anxiety about if & when to euthanize her, the high cost of it all. It's not even 8 pm here but I have an urge to crawl into bed & call it a day.

She got up to greet me this morning, then went back to her pillow. No interest in food or drink, not even canned tuna. Seems relaxed, not in any pain. So maybe I let nature take its course.

The situation is fraught because she is one of my mother's two cats, who I adopted when she went into assisted living in 2022. She died in 2023. My mother was a difficult presence in my life. Loving & creative *and* deeply self-absorbed & narcissistic. Sometimes had difficulty letting anyone else be the center of attention. She had severe Alzheimer's & it was a relief when she passed.

So maybe sadness about my mother is now displaced onto her/my cat. It is affecting my siblings that way, who I've been updating. They felt my mother's passing more deeply than I did