Reply #19: I had a cat named Ernie many years ago [View All]

[Horse with no Name]

I had gone away on Friday night, and when I returned on Sunday morning, he was very ill.
He had massive diarrhea...it was all over my apartment. He was lying in a ball of matted fur with his nose running and was very very ill.
I immediately called my vet AT HOME. She met me at her office and started IV's on him and got him comfortable. She told me it was something I had never heard of. Feline Leukemia.
It was touch and go. I loved this cat.
After she stabilized him, she sent him home. He was anorexic because his nose was stopped up.
Every single day we administered IV fluid boluses and force fed him to eat.
I took him to the vet every day. She didn't charge me anything except what her cost was.
She gave him an experimental drug (I cannot remember the name as it has been 20+ years ago). It was a chemotherapy to fight the FL.
It worked, but it made him very sick.
At one point, my beautiful 20 lb. longhair cat was almost bald and weighed less than 3 lbs and couldn't walk.
He had to be carried.
Two months into it, he started recovering. He responded well to the treatment.
If it weren't for this wonderful vet, my cat would have died.
She could have charged me thousands where she only charged me hundreds and I would have had to make a difficult choice.
Incidentally, she also put Ernie on Science Diet and he thrived.
The vets aren't the ones to blame here. It is the deregulation of governmental regulations that even allowed that crap into the country.
Science Diet has been great for years. There has never been an indication to think things would change.

On edit I left out one of the most important parts.
For some reason when his hair grew back, his long hair became medium but was an almost different color.
The vet used to tell me that everytime she had a bad day or lost a pet, she would always think about Ernie and pulling him back to life.