Over the last few days I've noticed that Allegra has started to feel really old. Mainly it's due to the fact that she feels as if she's lost weight, to the point where underneath that thick pelt of fur there is nothing but bones jutting through. She's acted as if she still has the same amount of energy as before, and the lump on her chin hasn't gotten any bigger as far as I can tell, but there was something definitely up. Plus it's been about four months since her initial diagnosis of bone cancer, back in October, and I decided it was time for a follow-up visit, just to see how things were going.

The good news, confirmed by the vet, is that the lump has not, in fact, gotten any larger. There was still a small possibility that it wasn't cancer at all, even when the radiologist confirmed it as such, but short of doing more invasive procedures there was no way to be 100% sure. Back then, faced with a fairly short life span remaining I decided it just wasn't worth it to put her through anything traumatic.

Back then she also showed elevated kidney indices in her blood tests, suggesting she's showing signs of kidney disease. But since we expected that the cancer would be the thing to do her in, and since she's been notoriously snitty about any sort of cooperation for health-related poking and prodding, we decided we wouldn't worry about that either.

Now, however, that things seem to have stabilized on the cancer front (if it is, indeed, cancer), we realized it was time to deal with the other issues, like figuring out some way to somehow switch her to a completely separate food than all the other cats, without adversely affecting any of the felines in the household. It didn't work very well when we'd attempted to do it for Rebecca last year so I wasn't exactly hopeful it would work much better for Allegra.

Ha. I should know by now to never predict what a cat will do. Luckily Allegra loves her new food (probably because it's canned food and all cats seem to vastly prefer the canned to the dry). She loves it to the point that she will come downstairs and stand in the kitchen and holler indignantly until one of us gets it out for her so she can nibble a few more bites and hop back down off the counter to go off somewhere for a few hours before she repeats the process all over again.

So…I guess we'll see how it goes. It could still be cancer in her jaw. There could be other issues we haven't even touched yet. But at least we seem to have the kidney disease issue mostly in hand at this point.