Here is the best cat in the world enjoying a sunbeam this morning. To be honest, I thought Azar wasn’t going to still be alive when I woke up today (not that I slept much!). In fact, the past two nights I’ve barely slept because he’s been tossing and turning and sometimes crying out, totally breaking my heart. I would have taken him to the vet’s yesterday but I had my own hospital day, plus a tapas tour in the evening. So today I brought him in to see Eva just to get another opinion on whether it was time to let Azar go, though when I saw him looking so content in that sunbeam I hoped there was still more I could do.

Well, the sad thing is that Eva does think that Azar is probably on his way out. Since the trauma of his exploding tumour, about ten days ago, he’s stopped eating on his own and has to be fed using a syringe. And then on Sunday he stopped drinking on his own, which was the thing he always used to do no matter what. Eva said cats with kidney problems go through a lot of low periods, but then rally again. The thing that’s hard to know now is whether this is a low time because of the whole tumour thing, which has left his only good front leg too weak to walk on, not to mention the pain involved, or whether he’s just had enough.

The good thing about taking him in this morning is that I now have a time-frame and treatment regimen to work with. I still need to keep changing the bandages 2-3 times a day – the wound is almost completely healed, which Eva still can’t believe – and I was told to keep feeding him the same amount of food I’ve been giving him (was very glad to hear I’d been giving him the right amount!). Now I also have to start giving him 20 mls of water a day, in 5 ml doses. If I do all that and by Friday there is no improvement then it will be time to say goodbye.

I did wonder if it was time to say goodbye this morning, until I saw him in the sunbeam and thought “not just yet”.