Furbaby Bills Drained Our Savings

My furbaby, which I raised from 7 weeks old, became very ill right before Christmas. Her name was Willow ( but I call her Bug sometimes). She was the chattiest, most friendly snugglebug there ever was.Unfortunately, I live in Alaska, and we had the 7.0 quake back at the end of November, 2018, along with many 4.0+ and 5.0+ aftershocks. Willow had always had some trouble with anxiety, and as a result, she has had some IBS issue (irritable bowel syndrome). I didn't think of it right away, but I could see she had some PTSD from the earthquake.My husband, Robby, has Parkinson's Disease, along with other head issues, and I struggle with hormonal issues and severe migraines. We cannot have children, and our animals are our children. With those health issues, we didn't notice minor changes with Willow, until the week of Christmas, she began to be extremely listless, and acting like when her IBS would flare up and cause constipation issues. She stopped eating and drinking, as well as using the litterbox. I tried to give her pumpkin, as the vet in Oregon had me do when she had that trouble. She ate a tiny bit but then started refusing it. She also became very yellow tinted with pale gums. I knew that I needed to take her in. Now, Robby and I had been saving a bit so that we could take a trip back to the East Coast to visit family and friends, as I am from WNY, and Robby used to live out there too. We figured this would most likely be the last big trip we could take before his Parkinson’s made it too challenging and expensive to travel. With that, we were planning to go to the 50th Anniversary of Woodstock too.I took Willow in to an emergency vet appointment and they ran bloodwork and x-rayed her as well to check for a blockage. No blockage was present thankfully, but her labs were scary. Her pancreatic enzymes were elevated, but even worse, her liver enzymes were something like 70x what they should be for normal range. They advised me to transfer her to an Animal Hospital with an ER, and since she was our furbaby, I agreed. Just the testing alone was close to $600 before the transfer.I travelled to the animal hospital, worried sick about my little Bug. There, she had another exam done, and the doctor advised that she needed to stay overnight, and to get a feeding tube. What the vets can figure out is that the earthquake ramped up her IBS and caused a stress induced pancreatitis, an inflamed pancreas. Since the pancreas, liver, and gall bladder are literally next to each other in a cat, the liver and gall bladder became inflamed. With the inflammation, Willow ended up with bad nausea, which caused her to not eat. Not eating caused her body to start digesting her fat, which overwhelmed her liver. She ended up with hepatitis lipadosis from this, which essentially is fatty liver disease, or a form of cirrhosis. Basically, if I didn’t have her stay the night and get the feeding tube, she would pass away within a couple of days. I paid high of the higher estimate, which is was $1800. My poor honey stayed two days in the hospital, without much improvement. I came in to the animal hospital and I was taught how to continue tube feeding. I was told to come back in a day for her medications if she did not start eating on her own. The two day stay ended up being just shy of $2,000.Willow didn’t improve and wasn’t eating her own food, so I had to come in to get her medications, which totaled around $250 then. Every six hours, I had to set an alarm and give her water, liquefied food, and her medications for a week straight. A few days later, I noticed Willow was not liking me touching her feeding tube, and I checked under the bandage. Her feeding tube wound was weeping yellow foul-smelling pus, so off to the hospital we went again. They had to clean her up and gave her a three-day antibiotic shot. This cost approximately another $200.On the third day, I noticed her wound was weeping even more foul-smelling pus. Once again, off to the vet we went. This time, they gave me liquid antibiotics to put into her tube. They cleaned out the wound and put an herbal salve on it to boot. This cost about another $200. I continued the every six hour feeding and medication time. Slowly, but surely, Willow started doing better. Her wound continued weeping pus for about 4 days, which I cleaned up around the bandage when I could. About a week after, she was finally acting like herself, and I took her back to the vet to get the tube removed and check her bloodwork. This cost us $400. This doesn’t include travel expenses with traveling back and forth to the vet, which was 20 miles from our house.With all of these bills, we wiped out our savings account and cannot afford taking that trip of a lifetime and going to Woodstock, before my husband’s disease becomes inhibitive of travel. Please help us pay off our bills from Willow’s sickness and have a little money to travel to New York to visit friends and family. Thank you.

Rest In Peace Willow Bug
Born April 1, 2012
Died January 26, 2019
You were my sweet baby girl, my fur baby, my daughter. Thank you for all your unending love.