My Marley is a Sick Cat


Blog, Cats / Monday, May 5th, 2014

If you’ve read much of anything on this site, you know I have an overly healthy love for my cat. She has been in my care for the past six years (though for the time I was in Ukraine, friends and family looked after her). I like to think the two of us have been through a lot together and we are there for each other, more as equals and friends than the parent/child relationship most people seem to have with their loved pets.

When I had Luna in my care, Marley didn’t speak to me as much. Only as formalities. I understood her tone. I was hers and she was mine and neither of us were to share. I also noticed that Marley ate as much of Luna’s food as she could (not good for Luna because she was bone thin already). She ate and she ate and it seemed like she was putting on a few pounds, quickly.

So when I noticed recently that she wasn’t eating, I quickly started to wonder if I had a sick cat on my hands. She would go a week at a time and she’d really only pick at the food. I’d top it off each day but it became less and less.

Then to see if she wasn’t the sick cat I thought she was, I tried changing her diet. I started mixing soft food in with her leftover food from breakfast and that did the trick. She’d eat it right up. But only for a week. She’s back to not eating now.

Marley, as adorable as ever, just smaller.
Marley, as adorable as ever, just smaller.

But I think Ellie and I figured out what the problem is. It’s not that Marley is a sick cat with a disease that upsets her appetite. We think she has a toothache.

By trial and error of giving her her normal food and then the food we knew she wouldn’t refuse, we determined this. The soft foods she ate, or tried to eat, and the hard foods she really only sniffed. When I offered her cheese, her favorite food, she took it greedily, tried eating it but couldn’t swallow it. That’s when I knew. That’s what confirmed she really was having problems.

So, after all our time together without needing to go, I broke down and decided to take her to the vet. To most, this might not seem like a big deal so much as a logical step but for me it was a big deal. For me, I wanted to think my cat was special and immune to being a sick cat who needed to be babied. But no cheese? It’s serious.

Hopefully, when I drop Marley off at the vet tomorrow I’ll find out that she can easily, painlessly, and not too hard on my wallet, be healed. Hopefully the vet can make her a happy cat once more who can eat all the cheese she wants and she can plump back up to her fighting weight (albeit a low weight because Marley has always been a smaller cat). Hopefully, the vet won’t return her still as a sick cat.

Stay tuned for the updates!

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