My very expensive cat

Our 11-month old kitten taught us a very expensive lesson last week.

It started on Sunday Feb. 3 when she seemed to be getting sick. We didn't think much of it -- in other words, a cat puking on the carpet was nothing new. Monday was much of the same, but it was Monday night that I realized she didn't come for dinner. Weird, I thought, because this cat eats everything in sight as fast as she can.

By Tuesday she had pretty much disappeared and by Wednesday evening, we were worried. She was lethargic and moaned when you touched her. And I started to realize that she hadn't eaten or drank in days. So off to the emergency vet clinic we went.

One x-ray and a hospital admission later and we had one very sick cat. And a very difficult decision to make -- do we pay what it's going to cost to make her better or basically let her die. In the end, it was an easy decision to make -- we'd pay the money. After all, it's not like she's an old cat, she's not even a year old. But more importantly, she's the kids' cat and losing her would devastate them -- especially if we knew that there was something we could have done to help her.

And especially since she wasn't 'sick' in medical terms. Instead, she had eaten something that wasn't edible and it was now lodged in her intestine.

What did she eat you ask? She had gnawed off a piece of the kids' foam playmats. You know those inter-locking coloured mats that you put down on floors to make them fun, or in our case, on top of the carpet to protect where the kids' will be colouring with markers. Yeah, those $25 mats.

So after spending a small fortune for one night at the emergency vet clinic on tests and treatment (because did I mention that she was severely, severely dehydrated from not eating or drinking for days), we moved her to our vet clinic on Thursday morning.

She was monitored there for the day on the off-chance that she'd 'pass' the obstruction on her own once she received enough fluids by IV.

No such luck. And on Friday morning she had surgery where the vet pulled two of these chunks out of her intestine:

Lovely, isn't it? How she managed to swallow them I'll never know.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent recovering from surgery at the clinic and even though the vet took pity on us and gave us a break on certain fees, you don't want to know how much we spent to save this cat's life. I can think of a lot of other things I could've spent that money on.

Was it worth it? Yes. Moo loves the kids and they love her (and so do we). She really is a part of our family....albeit now, a very expensive part of our family. Oh and those mats...they're about to go on the curb for garbage pickup.