Hi all,

I had a 13 year old fospice cat with kidney issues and mitral valve dysplasia for almost 2 years and am really struggling with losing her. This past Friday, I had gotten home from work to see she’d vomited a couple times. She had issues with constipation and would sometimes vomit after trying to go to the bathroom from straining. I didn’t think anything of it, and cleaned up the messes like I always did. She was a bit lethargic but, again, figured she just needed to go to the bathroom. Saturday she was acting the same until around 6 pm. She seemed more lethargic so I massaged her belly in hopes of helping her have a bowel movement. Around 8 pm she was barely moving and it was obvious she needed medical attention so we rushed her to the ER. They saw her after a few hours, did blood tests, and discovered her WBCs and kidney values were extremely elevated. It was determined she’d developed sepsis from a multi-drug resistant UTI. We had actually been in the process of getting an antibiotic compounded for her before this visit (it was determined to have intermediate effectiveness against her bacteria) but the infection had spread too fast. Since the antibiotic wasn’t ready and she was already in such bad shape by this point, we ended up putting her to sleep in my arms. I can’t help but think about the what ifs-what if we had pushed to get the antibiotic faster, what if she was in pain for a long time, what if I had realized this wasn’t a normal bout of constipation and taken her in sooner? I know it’s unlikely they could’ve done anything even if we had caught it sooner but my heart hurts thinking she was in pain longer than she needed to be. I worry she’d stopped drinking and eating before Saturday and I just hadn’t noticed (she didn’t eat much normally anyways but was also free fed so it was hard to tell). I feel like it all happened so fast and looking back, I can’t help but wonder if there was anything else I could’ve done.