Tearful Goodbyes

As some of you know, we had to make the very difficult decision to put down our kitty Nala recently.  She was only a year old, so I never thought the day would come so soon.  Ever since we moved into our new house, she had a tough time with the transition.  Apparently cats have a really hard time with change and stress which can trigger a variety of medical conditions.  After numerous trips to the vet and medications in attempt to pinpoint what was wrong, she took a turn for the worst.  She started having accidents around the house, sleeping 23.5 hours a day (literally) and was getting so frail.  We had some bloodwork done in a last attempt to figure out what was going on.  Nothing could have prepared me for what came next...

The doctor came back in the room and explained that Nala had a terminal illness called Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP) that is rare, but fatal virus. She said she's likely caught it from her mother when she was a baby, but it didn't show symptoms until this summer. Cats that have FIP have an amazing ability to mask the disease until they are in a crisis state, so there was really no way of knowing that this was coming.

The news hit me like a ton of bricks.

The vet recommended that we consider putting Nala out of suffering as soon as possible and so that Simba wouldn't catch the disease (since it's very contagious between cats). I took her home, called Steve and spent the rest of the afternoon cuddling with her. Selfishly we wanted to keep her alive as long as possible, but we knew what was best for her. The night Steve and I took her in and said our last tearful goodbyes.

We miss you baby girl...