Saving Pumpkin….. Saving ourselves…. Posted on 4:40pm Monday 18th Mar 2019

Sorry for the randomly written out sections of these posts but I’m finding it hard to condense everything into coherent sentencing when there’s just SO MUCH going on that nobody other than myself and Johnny ever sees.

Pumpkin stopped eating on 5th March 2019, we first thought it was her usual “she’ll eat a little later” so shared her food between Chewie & Eggy. Then later that day she still wouldn’t eat, so I made Johnny reach in to the big house and extracto-pandito…… much to her harumphing and scrabbles to stay in her bed…

She begrudgingly ate a large pile of Felix Crispies and I was every so thankful that she was at least eating SOMETHING. She suddenly developed a duck quacking noise in her throat a day or two afterwards while still each day fighting to get her to eat SOMETHING, Anything! and we feared that perhaps her throat had something stuck in it, a stray crunch off of a Crispy perhaps.. Pum has NEVER been a “touch my mouth”er aside from loving her chinny and gummywobbles tickled so fighting to hold her head, open her mouth AND check her throat while Johnny struggled to hold her still as she wiggled and squirmed to get free.. wasn’t fun!

Skip ahead a few days to the 13th as she’d been refusing to drink while we were out there for almost a week. Not once seeing her drink, trying all kinds of tactics to get fluids into her… she still wouldn’t eat… not even “lickies” off of the blunt knife we use for mixing wet foods with pills….and was literally surviving only on Felix Crispies, YET she was still here? How?

• The cruel irony was that even as Beany felt sniffly and unwell the night before he died (we didn’t know it was anything other than his normal little allergies at the time, nothing was different) he was still eager to try to eat and drink water slowly out of a shallow bowl on the sofa for us because he knew he should try when Mummy said “it will help you feel better”… and .. **Pauses as tears flow**.. he was gone the next morning….within four hours from the last feed.

But here we were watching and Pumpkin somehow defied everything and was still with us when she seemingly hadn’t eaten or drank in many more days than it would take a cats immune system to completely shut down, liver problems to occur etc. It just didn’t make sense.
We NEVER would wish one took the place of another, that is NOT what I am saying, but it kicked us both so hard in the depths of our hearts and “feels” that we lost one so suddenly and without warning, when another was being so “See if I care, I won’t eat. I don’t want to go on” attitudinal. It quickly reached the point where Johnny winced every time we had to grab her from her bed to try and make her eat.

Finally around three days ago I said we HAVE to try putting her separate from the others, may she would eat when we aren’t out there (and obviously leaving food in the big house, the others would eat it!). So we set up Eggys little house as a single floored flat for Pum to curl up in, using the base board of our dismantled cat scratcher tree as a raised floor for her bed to go on while also blocking off the ladder hole (a steeper ladder than she is used to in the other house, and for a wobbly legged panda-cat, not a good idea to mount and dismount that right now) we set up the litter box, grey bed – complete with heat pad obviously, a water bowl, wet food and dries just in case she fancied once and not the other overnight… and inserted the panda. For someone who had been sad down most of the last week she was quick to start pacing up and down staring around for a way out… I feared I’d made the wrong decision but knew I HAD to do something drastic while not wanting to hurt her / scare her obviously.

As much as it hurt me to see her look abandoned and scared to start with, she quickly settled in to her grey bed and we said goodnight and came in to get on with many many orders from FurwebsMarket… 
The next morning we were a bit late going back out to them as it had been severely windy and we had had things we needed to run around checking first.

When we got in there my heart suddenly skipped a beat when I put the key in the door, struggled to NOT say “morning babies, morning Beany, Pum, Egg, Chew”….and realised that I couldn’t hear the Duck Quack of pums sniffly breathing… “Oh god no, has she gone too? I should have come out sooner, was it because I made her go it alone?” all raced through my mind a million what ifs and maybes a second…. then I realised I could just about hear her, she must have been asleep but woke when she heard the door unlock.

She ended up having not eaten over night, wanting to desperately go in the big house, her house and as soon as she was in there drank and drank (not excessive, just not tiny slurp and walk off type things..) Johnny interjected that perhaps as she couldn’t drink overnight she wanted it from her own bowl in the morning. She did have water etc in with her but she maybe just didn’t “know” it was hers? Anyway it was a good sign. She drank… 

Later that morning / afternoon (it’s switched back to being longer out there ironically now often taking 2-3 hours each feed session) I had the idea of spoon feeding her wets again, she wasn’t impressed but kept licking little bits off her top lip as i spooned it towards her.