Coping With Feline Leukemia Virus

A sad story that ends with another one. About 6 months ago, my older male cat 20yrs old started drooling alot. Most after eating and drinking. He seemed fine and acted normal besides that, so I didn’t worry about it.

One night, he started meowing really loud and wouldn’t come out from under my water bed. The next morning I found him dead and took him to a vet to see why this happend. The vet said he had a stroke and was most likely caused by old age.

Now six months later. I came home from work on a friday night and when I opened the door, my younger cat of 10yrs started meowing and begging for me to pet her like usual. I did and just like any other time, she wanted to eat as soon as I stopped. This is all a normal routine for her.

About 5hrs later, I got up to go to the bathroom and found her laying on the bathroom floor. I called her to come and follow me to my room, but she would not leave. The next morning when I got up, she was still there. So now, I picked her up and brang her into my room. For 2 days all she wanted to do was sleep in the self cleaning litter box and eat and drink. She never wanted to go out or leave the bedroom.

I decided to take her to the vets and see if she was sick. They took blood and said she had feline Leukemia and she was in pain. They said she would only live a few days and if I wanted to take her home or put her down. They said they was going to give her blood because she lost alot of red blood cells. They never even tried. They just said she would die in a few days.

They said they could try a blood transfusion but would be somewhere around $3,000 and I would be doing this every 3 months or so. That would be the only way to keep her alive and live a full life. Of course, I cant afford that every 3 months, so I had to put her down. If it was longer between transfusions, I would have.

I decided to check some websites and found alot of them say with transfusions, you can keep your cat alive, if you keep getting them when they are needed. I also found I wasn’t being told the truth, since most sites are saying after this would give a cat a year to three years before it would need another one. If I knew this before I put her down, I would still have my Kitty.

Kitty is her name by the way. After I had her put down I started thinking of things I hadn’t noticed at first. Two weeks before she started acting like this, she always wanted to sleep on my pillow. When I wanted to go to bed, I had to move her back to her chair. She would jump right back on the bed. I would wake up and find her sleeping behind my head. She used to do this when she was younger but stopped. So I didn’t think anything was wrong.

I think she was trying to let me know something was wrong, in my opinion. I mentioned alot because it may help someone else if it ever happens to their cat.

It is very hard losing her and very hard to sleep. She was always around me, always wanted to play and be petted. Always begging to go out and then climbing on my screen windows to come in at all hours of the night. So as you can imagine, almost every moment in my house makes me think of her. Hard, very hard and do not wish this on anyone.