Another day, another loosely coiled pile of cat dookie hiding downstairs near, but not in, the litter box. We changed her food recently. She wasn't eating her old food, and losing weight was not an outcome this 14-year-old feline could afford. She wasn't eating her old food because it was special medical food to help with the intestinal disease she'd been living with for the past few years. She had surgery last year to get her some quality of life back, which did help, but for a while, she's barely been eating her dry food. They make a canned version of her special food, which she loves, but it gave...let's say less than ideally consistent movements, so we didn't want to keep her on the canned. But she was losing weight.
Her latest vet checkup didn't reveal anything new, except for a last-ditch idea to try the other flavors available in her special food. As we suspected, that didn't help. We need food that she'll eat that also won't give her fecal urgency. But there's a problem. We're at the point where we don't have time to experiment. She's losing too much weight to risk spending weeks or months trying different foods only for her to continue not eating. We have to find a food she'll eat every day as soon as possible and hope she holds everything else together.
Which brings me to the new routine of cleaning cat shit up multiple times a week. I don't want to paint you a picture here, so I'll describe the nature of these gifts as "healthy-looking". This is good. We'll take that. She's still using the litter box most of the time for the poops, and she never urinates elsewhere. This is good. We also got her an automatic food dispenser so we can portion out her food precisely and keep an eye on how much she's leaving in the bowl. So far, none. This is very good.
Sometimes, things work out perfectly. And by sometimes, I mean maybe a dozen in our lifetime. The rest of the time, we have to make a decision to sacrifice something for the betterment of something else. My 11-year-old wants to watch some extra TV and take a bath instead of a shower tonight. No. Baths take extra time already. That's an or. The power company is upgrading the lines and poles on my street so we have less frequent power outages. Awesome. I want them to do that and not murder two dozen beautiful trees along the road. No. The trees are in the way. That's an or. For the record, I'd keep the trees and bury the lines, but again, maybe burying the lines will cost 10x and have second-order drawbacks.
And I want my cat to live longer but not pinch her little cat loaves a mere 5 feet from her litter box. But to live longer she has to gain some weight. And to do that, we have to give her food she'll actually eat. Time will always run out on avoiding the sacrifice, and one way or another, we have to choose. So we take a deep breath (preferably away from ground zero), snap on some latex gloves, and bag the evidence, knowing the sacrifice is worth it.
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