A very good dad

While I went away this weekend to "Knitting Camp," Bill stayed home with Kaesea. It's exhausting to take care of Kaesea when we are both home, so I know that doing it alone is even more draining. We are always worrying about him -- when he is sleeping, we often have the "Is he breathing?!" experience. It's bad.

But the feeding situation is the real struggle -- he is so finicky. At random, he rejects food that he has been eating regularly for a month or two. Then we have to find something else that might interest him -- when we put it down, we stand there and think, "Eat. Please, please eat this." And then he'll eat just a little bit of it. And this goes on All. The. Time. It is always time to try to feed Kaesea in our house. Always.

When both of us are home, at least there is someone to lean on and share the constant feeding burden with, but Bill did it alone for four long days and I am very grateful. What a great dad. And husband!

Despite the struggles eating, Kaesea did gain weight this week. Yay! When we got home from our honeymoon, he weighed 9.13 lbs. At his appointment this week, he was up to 9.41. Fantastic!

As for his spirit, he is still playing with toys and purring and loving the catnip, but he is also in some pain (which we control with pain killers) and sometimes seems a little [and I feel goofy saying this, but] depressed. It's hard to explain, but he is just "down" sometimes.

As we have observed this behavior, we have made the decision to go ahead and try chemotherapy. It's difficult to know what is best for him -- if he was a human, he could tell us whether or not he wanted treatment. But he's a cat, so we cannot know exactly what he wants. So we try to make the decisions we feel are best for him.

And, in a way, for us. Because we'd like him to stay around. It's difficult to resist the ray of hope that chemo offers us -- the feeling that maybe this will fix him. Of course, there's no guaranteed "fix" for this, but we can maybe get a couple more years with him, rather than just a couple of weeks or months. We hope.