For the last week we've been noticing that our cat Juliet (was my mother's before she passed) has been losing weight. At first with everything going on in our lives I attributed it to the recent change in food, but yesterday we got worried enough to bring her into the vet.

Turns out things are a lot worse than we thought, and her kidney's were shutting down. The sad part of this is usually by the time you can see a cat's kidney's are failing, they are already almost 75% gone. The point is between her age and progress of the disease, she's pretty much almost guarenteed to die or need a lifetime of daily care.

We were given two options; euthanize her or give her expensive and immediate 24x7 emergency care at a local animal hospital that runs.....well runs 24x7 (our vet closes on weekends past noon on Saturday). As it stands right now Juliet is in 24 hour care receiving diuresis (which is massive amounts of fluid to flush her system and hopefully restart whatever is left of the kidney's at this point). It takes 3 days at least to tell what she will bounce back with in terms of kidney function, and at this point the odds are very poor she'll have anywhere close to enough to live normally. The question really is how much, and will it be enough to make it.

Juliet is a cat, and one that normally doesn't even like me. She didn't even belong to me, nor did I purchase her. On top of that we can't afford the multiple hundreds if not thousands of dollars this is going to run, and even if she survives she'll never be herself and almost always require daily care to survive.

So the fuck what. It doesn't matter how I feel or am inconveinienced, she is a life, and when I took her into our house I accepted responsibility for that life. I'm not going to put her down just because it's the easy choice, and placate myself with soothing cliches like "it's for the best" or "she was in pain but now she's not"....not while I know there is still a chance for her to pull through, even if it's a slim one. So what if I can't afford to buy the latest video game or beer to drink. I'd rather go through life with none of that then so rashly and calously kill her because it's annoying to have to deal with it.

I'm not going to pump her full of drugs and make her a zombie, but while I could end the lives of a thousand cats, I still can't make a single one. That just tells me that I want to make sure we do everything we can.