I'm going through that crap right now. My husband's 15 year old princess of a cat has kidney disease. We had to wait to go to the vet until we had money, because we'd moved and we were doing a bit of wishful thinking that maybe her weight loss was either nerves or having more space to run around in, as all of the cats lost a little weight with the move.
The first visit ran over $300, then $66 in antibiotics, then $25 for a SubQ set up, then $200 for the next visit... She said what she really recommended was hospitalizing her for a week, at about $1000. I asked her, "So what are the odds that spending that $1000 to make my cat miserable is going to present me with a healthy cat at the end of it. Because if you can give me better odds that 50/50 I'll FIND the money. I'll beg, borrow or steal it. I'll live out of my car if I have to."
She couldn't, in fact the odds weren't even 50/50. "But it's still my recommendation."
Yeah, you recommend I spend a grand I don't have, to isolate a fifteen year old cat from the Daddy she loves more than tuna or the red dot on a 20% chance it MIGHT work. OR we keep doing subQ fluids at home, feeding her all the tuna we can stuff in her grubby little mouth, and loving her until she's not happy, which I will still be spending assloads of money on, but it will be assloads of money spread out over time, with a cat who is actually much easier to do subQ fluids on than she is to medicate. (Yeah, tell me again how I'm doing it wrong because I can't get pills in her, then the vet tech came in and couldn't get them in her either. Fuck woman, I have told you how many cats I have owned and have rescued, including long-term kidney disease care and bottle-raising litters. I'm not an idiot. I know how to pill a cat. And I also know when I can't pill a cat because the cat is unpill-able.)
I've played the kidney disease game before. And the first time what it gave me was an $800 dead cat, after a week of hospitalization, and my special boy cat not even wanting to look at me by the end because of the hell we'd put him true selfishly trying eke out just a little more time.
Not only can I not afford that economically, I can't afford it emotionally, and neither can my husband. It'd be nice if I could just throw money at the problem like and hope, and not sink financially whether it worked or not. But the really real world doesn't work like that, and sometimes you have to make some shitty fucking choices about quality of life and how whether it's worth losing your house to take a chance on a treatment that has never given you back a healthy cat in the end.
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The first visit ran over $300, then $66 in antibiotics, then $25 for a SubQ set up, then $200 for the next visit... She said what she really recommended was hospitalizing her for a week, at about $1000. I asked her, "So what are the odds that spending that $1000 to make my cat miserable is going to present me with a healthy cat at the end of it. Because if you can give me better odds that 50/50 I'll FIND the money. I'll beg, borrow or steal it. I'll live out of my car if I have to."
She couldn't, in fact the odds weren't even 50/50. "But it's still my recommendation."
Yeah, you recommend I spend a grand I don't have, to isolate a fifteen year old cat from the Daddy she loves more than tuna or the red dot on a 20% chance it MIGHT work. OR we keep doing subQ fluids at home, feeding her all the tuna we can stuff in her grubby little mouth, and loving her until she's not happy, which I will still be spending assloads of money on, but it will be assloads of money spread out over time, with a cat who is actually much easier to do subQ fluids on than she is to medicate. (Yeah, tell me again how I'm doing it wrong because I can't get pills in her, then the vet tech came in and couldn't get them in her either. Fuck woman, I have told you how many cats I have owned and have rescued, including long-term kidney disease care and bottle-raising litters. I'm not an idiot. I know how to pill a cat. And I also know when I can't pill a cat because the cat is unpill-able.)
I've played the kidney disease game before. And the first time what it gave me was an $800 dead cat, after a week of hospitalization, and my special boy cat not even wanting to look at me by the end because of the hell we'd put him true selfishly trying eke out just a little more time.
Not only can I not afford that economically, I can't afford it emotionally, and neither can my husband. It'd be nice if I could just throw money at the problem like and hope, and not sink financially whether it worked or not. But the really real world doesn't work like that, and sometimes you have to make some shitty fucking choices about quality of life and how whether it's worth losing your house to take a chance on a treatment that has never given you back a healthy cat in the end.