Welcome Joe, you have come to the right place. There are a lot of knowledgeable and caring people here. Gina
Joe Reil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Howdy all, This is my first post to this list, thought I'd do a bit of intro. We had three cats in our family. The older two were both "castaways" that were adopted as adults. Zoro was the oldest and I adopted him from a co-worker when I lived by myself. He died several years ago. The remaining two were Stitch and Chewie. Chewie was the next oldest. She had a really hard start to life, she was originally found, as a stray by some friends of ours. She was probably two or three at the time and she had evidence of being abused - she had some suspicious scars on her underside. She lived with them for a while, very shy/nervous and eventually came out of her shell. A couple years later, they had to move, and couldn't take her with them so we took her in. We had her for several years as well and while we don't know her exact age, best estimate put her at 8-10 years old when she died last month. She had a loss of appetite and started losing weight. She had two trips to the Vet - after the first visit she took a serious turn for the worse so we had her back at the vet only a few days later. A blood test on the second visit revealed that she had FelV. So, considering she was very sick and was suffering from a pretty serious disease we opted to put her to sleep then. :( I didn't know much about FelV then (and I'm still learning about it), but information from both our Vet and online resources I found indicated that it was contagious so we decided to have our third (and youngest) cat tested for it. Stitch is the only one we got as a Kitten and she's about 3.5 years old. I brought her to the vet this weekend and she tested positive for FelV. :( I do intend to learn as much as I can about the disease so we can keep her with us as long as possible. I know that it will eventually catch up to her and our main thing will be to put that off as long as possible. She's still young and healthy so hopefully that'll be a long time still. :) We had been planning to get a second cat, but we've put that plan on hold now. I know it is possible to inoculate against FelV, but given that the vaccine takes a while to take effect, we'd either have to quarantine the new cat until the vaccine took effect or find it someplace else to live for a month or so, and on top of all that I don't think we want to put Stitch through the stress of another housemate at the moment (she doesn't react well to strangers). Thanks, Joe ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396546091 Visit my Tigger Tales site! --------------------------------- Expecting? Get great news right away with email Auto-Check. Try the Yahoo! Mail Beta.
