Reason # 9,352,741 I know James is going to be an amazing dad...

Some of you know that James and I are crazy cat people and our cats are like children to us.  We have two kittens cats that we adopted within our first month of marriage, Sophie & Smokey.  Smokey has always been significantly bigger and Sophie was the runt of their 4 kitten litter.  She's always had issues with gaining weight, and ever since she was a few months old, she's had issues with vomiting.  We've taken her to multiple veterinarians trying to find out if something is wrong with her and they've all given us the same advice, change her diet.  We've tried cheap dry food, expensive dry food, prescription dry food, all wet food diet, prescription wet food diet, kitten food...you name it, we've tried it.  Nothing has helped.  She still throws up at least once a day, sometimes several times, and she's never weighed more than 5.5 lbs.

The vet we took the cats to when we moved here was the first one to tell us that he believed she may have a real, diagnosable problem.  So, when she continued to get worse after that visit and even lost some weight, we decided to take her back in.  I couldn't go because it's way to stressful for me.  She's AWFUL when she goes to the vet and bites and scratches and growls and they always end up having to gas her to do anything to her.  I can't stand to see her like that.  So, James took her this morning. They did a lot of testing including blood work and x-rays to see what was wrong and the end diagnosis is Feline Irritable Bowel Disease.  Basically, some cats are born with an inability to tolerate any type of grains, and grains are in pretty much EVERY kind of cat food that you can buy in stores.  When they eat them, it irritates their stomach and intestines and everything gets inflamed, causing her to vomit all the time, in turn causing her to not absorb any of the essential nutrients that she needs.  So after multiple tests, she finally has a diagnosis and a plan for treatment.

We have to feed her NOTHING but a prescription wet food from the vet that has nothing but meat in it, venison to be exact, she has to take multiple supplements to get her the nutrition she's been lacking until her bowels aren't inflamed anymore, and she has to go in every 2 weeks for steroid shots to help the inflammation go down.  Thankfully, the vet says that we should really start to see an improvement and she should start to put on weight and he thinks she's going to be just fine.

The thing that really got to me, was the fact upon arriving home from the vet I asked James how much her visit today had cost...his reply?  "It doesn't matter, she's going to get better."  Then I swiped the bill and found out that he had spent over $650 on this one vet visit and didn't even blink an eye.  All he wants is for her to get better and be healthy.  I could have cried.  I know he cares about her just as much as I do, but that really made me feel good about what kind of father he's going to be.  If he has the capacity to care this much out our kitties, I can only imagine how much he's going to love our son.

Sleeping off all the drugs...poor baby.