You may or may not know, I turn 39 years old on Thursday. Aside from this being the last year of my third decade life, there’s a something that’s going to make this day pretty awful. 

On Thursday at 2:30 PM, we will be taking our Cleo to the vet again. 

It breaks my heart to share that Cleo will not be coming home with us after this visit. Unfortunately, she’s going to be put to sleep and that’s going to be really tough. 

She actually turned thirteen yesterday. 

A few weeks back, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. She’d been having problems for a few months and none of the medications helped. At the beginning of August, we had her back to the vet and we learned that she had Crohn’s. 

We have been treating her with steroids every day to help with the intestinal inflammation. Those steroids helped a little bit at first but then they began making her vomit. 

After talking to the vet again, we were told to give her Pepcid AC twice a day. That’s supposed to help settle her stomach but it didn’t help. 

She can’t keep anything down and is losing more weight. She weighs about four pounds now and that’s down from the beginning of the month. 

We’ve tried everything and now her diarrhea is back again. 

After speaking with the vet’s office yesterday afternoon, it was decided that because of her age and everything that’s wrong, we are basically out of options. There are additional tests we can do but they are really expensive and the vet doesn’t believe we will learn anything that would change the situation. 

The most compassionate thing we can do is put her to sleep. 

We have the appointment booked for Thursday because it’s the only one available for the next two weeks. They’re hoping to get us in sooner, but at least it’s not too far out. 

Lizze and I have decided to stop the medication because it’s pointless, and it was making Cleo more miserable. 

This is going to be so hard because she’s been a part of our family, longer than the boys have been alive. Gavin was only three or four when we got her. 

Blue will be our only cat after this, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. After this, we have to get Maggie back in again because her tumors are back, and there’s at least three or four that we can see. She’s lost most of her hearing and I don’t even want to think about going down that rabbit hole. 

The vet says that all we can do is continue removing the tumors as they pop up and that’s it. Each tumor is almost $200 to remove and my guess is, it would have to be spread out over a few months. They take one or two and let her recover before removing the others. 

I’m feeling sick to my stomach as I’m writing this, so I’m going to end not here and try to get some sleep. 

This is going to be a rough week for all of us. :’-(