She's baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.

Sort of.

If you had asked me Friday morning about Vera, I would have been fighting tears. She got progressively worse Thursday night, her gasping getting louder, and, uh, the only way I can describe it is to say the sound got wetter. It made my heart constrict.

Friday morning when she stood in front of her food and water she was wobbly and she showed no interest in any of it. The vet said if she stopped eating completely then the only way to keep her going was intravenous feeding and antibiotics which would cost a fortune, with no guarantee the cat would live.

The spousal unit and I had already decided not to go down that road.

With a lump in my throat, I called our vet and she said that she would bump Vera up to the more powerful antibiotics a day early. The ones we had been trying came individually wrapped in a blister pack. The vet said she'd give me a credit for the unused drugs because they were sealed, apply it towards the more expensive antibiotics.

I love that woman.

It's was a 45 minute drive each way in sub-zero temperatures to get to the vet's and make the antibiotic swap. When I left the house Vera was lying on her side on the floor with her eyes half open, making the most terrible sounds as she struggled to breathe.

The new antibiotics were unbelievably small, just over an 1/8 of an inch in size. The vet had cut five of them in half so the cat could have 1 � pills a day. As I shook them out in my palm, it just seemed impossible that so much hope had to ride in something that tiny.

The spousal unit helped me get the pills down the cat's throat. I held her in my arms like a baby and with an eyedropper put a mix of lactose free milk and raw egg on her tongue, which she swallowed drop by drop. The cat was limp.

When I set her on a blanket on the floor nothing seemed to have changed.

At this point, it was all up to Vera. I decided I just couldn't stay in the house anymore and listen to the sounds she was making. I didn't want to be there if she died. So the spousal unit stuck around and I went off to the gym to burn off as much of the stress as I could.

When I walked back through the door three hours later I did not know what I would see. I went upstairs and there was Vera, wobbly, still sounding terrible, but making a determined effort to drink water. I made her a second batch of the egg/lactose free milk mix and she lapped some of it off the plate.

Each day she gets a little better, a little stronger. From time to time there are glitches in her breathing, sometimes lasting ten, fifteen minutes, but it's nothing like it was. She purrs. She is playful. She is eating normal cat food.

I won't say we're out of the woods, because she's still not grooming herself which isn't a great sign. Healthy cats are fastidious about their fur. She tires easily. As well, Vera has diarrhoea and that's not so good, either.

But oh, man, it's so much better than it was Friday morning.

The vet's office opens Monday and I'll see if there's anything else we can do now to help this scrappy little survivor claw her way back to health. The last time I saw a cat this sick fight so hard to live was when Zoe appeared on my doorstep almost 20 years ago, abandoned, almost dead from starvation. I had forgotten how hard it is to watch another creature suffer like this.

Tonight, for the first time since she fell ill, I have hope that Vera will pull through this.

I only wish I had half this cat's grit.

--Marn

P.S.�I want to thank all of my three loyal readers who offered to donate to a Save Vera fund. I was truly touched by your generosity.