Coping With Feline Immunodeficiency Virus

My boyfriend & I had bought 2 fun loving kittens from the same litter, a male & a female. They were both fun & energetic & then one day our male cat stopped wanting to play & would keep to himself a lot, but we didn’t think anything of it at first because he still showed us love and would play on occasion.

By the time we took him into the vet for his last vaccine he was still kinda “boring” & we didn’t know why. We told the vest that his behavior totally changed & he went from fun & playful to not wanting to play at all, not wanting to eat, always having ear mites, etc… Well the vet told us that the ear mites were normal in small kittens and that his behavior was normal for his age as well. My boyfriend & I trusted our vet since he is the professional & let it go.

About a little over a month later his symptoms were getting worse. One Saturday he stopped eating all together, started hiding under the bed a lot & we noticed that he started peeing on things & not in his litter box, so right away I called a different vet we had used for other pets & made an appointment for them 4 days later. A few hours later we went out for 30 minutes to grab some food & when we got home our kitten was just lying there not moving, but breathing, we just figured he was sleeping. Once he didn’t move when I opened up my sandwich I knew something was wrong. I went over to the floor to pick him up and he was completely lethargic, his heart was racing & his breathing was very faint. Right away we got into the car & rushed him to the animal hospital & after they observed him & hooked him up to an IV & gave him some oxygen the vet came in & told us he had the disease F.I.V.

We had never heard of it before & asked if we could treat it & she told us that our kitten was so bad already that it would be best to put him down. He was my baby boy so I refused to accept it, but eventually agreed to it because I didn’t want my baby to suffer. Later I googled F.I.V. & realized that all they symptoms I told my vet about when we saw him in July were symptoms of the disease & if my vet would have put 2 & 2 together when we told him what was wrong, we could have saved him. Now we have to deal with the loss of our kitten, who was only 6 months old, & at the same time try to prevent his sister from getting it & help her be able to cope without him being around.

It is very tough & the disease it horrible & knowing that my vet neglected us when we told him how our kitten was acting makes dealing with it so much harder. We burried him in a nice place with a picture of us along with one of him & his sister, but it saddens me to know he could have lived for several years had we caught it, or had our vet paid attention to us & our kitten. He was fine until one day his little body just couldn’t take it anymore.