James

Sometime this fall we got fed up with the fact that James was peeing all over the basement. It was starting to be less of a once in a while sort of thing and becoming the sort of thing where we couldn't leave anything on the floor or he would pee on it. We decided to take him to the vet just to figure it out.

They did some bloodwork and we changed out our litterboxes while we waited. When the call came in, we were all shocked. James's bloodwork was very abnormal. All signs pointed to multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma in his blood. We were referred to a veterinary oncologist.

The process to diagnose was thousands of dollars and the best we could expect with treatment was for James to live another year and we sort of tabled the topic thinking that we would make a decision after the Christmas season. Then poor James took a turn for the worse. Before the holidays were really over we came home from church to find James unable to walk. We took him to the emergency vet and the bloodwork revealed that the amount of protein in his blood was astronomical. He had likely had some neurological episode because his blood was actually gloppy. We took him home and set him up in our room with food and water and a heating pad under his bed. We loved on him as much as we possibly could and on a Wednesday in mid-January we said goodbye.

He was such a stinker of a cat but I loved him and he loved me. He was just 12 years old but had been a crochety old man for awhile. We miss him so much.