Today's Victory

I am worried about my big boy, Renn. He is thin and small, compared to what he once was; I can feel too many bones in him. I was going to take him to the veterinary, but he was there just in January, when his blood and urine tests showed nothing abnormal, aside from aging kidneys. My fear is that there is something that such tests don’t show. If there is, there is not much to be done about it.

One thing I can do is try to increase his eating. It wasn’t so long ago that he would consume a good amount of soft-food, though that consumption was irregular. Now, he eats almost none of it. He eats instead only hard-food. For the past couple of months, he enjoyed the gastro-intestinal food that would help his slowing kidneys and sooth his sometimes rebellious stomach. Now, he’s gone off of that but, thank goodness, prefers these days a decent commercial brand.

Still, he doesn’t eat enough. My big boy has always been a slight eater; the constant comment I would make about his diet was how impossible it was that somecat of his size and strength could sustain himself on such meagre fare. His consumption has diminished with his bulk, so that it has reached an unhealthy level. Rather than subject him to a pointless veterinary visit, I called his doctor and asked if I could order an appetite-stimulant without Renn going to the hospital for another examination. Fortunately, the doctor agreed, probably due to how recent his last tests were, and the doctor’s own concern with Renn’s vanishing weight.

Mirtazapine, transdermally applied to my Renn’s ears, will be available this week. With that, and luck, he will want to eat more. Even if it is a relief, it will likely be temporary. He is just fifteen years old this year, but, as a friend remarked, he looks nineteen. As with many senior cats, we think of their futures by the day, not the year, and if I can stop my big boy from getting any smaller, I will consider it today’s victory.