October 29, 2007

  • Right now Gilly and I are faced with another very hard decision regarding Zazu. He's passing a whole lot of kidney stones now, and the vet says tomorrow we either have to do surgery or put him down. The surgery involves cutting off his penis and essentially giving him female genitals, shortening and widening his urethra so the stones don't get stuck on the way out. Right now they have to insert a needle to drain his bladder because when they put in catheters, he pulls then out. The vet even tried stitching the tube in and gluing over the stitches, and he STILL ripped it out. He's still very lively, cuddly, and purry when we go in to see him. He keeps trying to run away when we open his cage.

    The trouble is, he has a heart murmur and may not be able to survive the surgery. He would also be very susceptible to bladder infections for the rest of his life, and they could be life-threatening. The vet says he could live a couple of weeks or a couple of years, and there's no way to know. We have to decide by the morning, and we just don't know what to do. It's so hard to let him go so soon after losing Dad. We're both leaning toward surgery, but won't make the call until the morning.