Oh, Louise

I have a sick kitty. She's vomiting nearly every day now, and this has been going on for a month. When I first called the vet about it several weeks ago, they told me to take her to the emergency vet, which I did. The emergency vet thought it was hairballs, because she was vomiting up hairballs, undigested food, or both. He recommended more frequent brushing, a gel for hairball control, and a switch to a hairball control food. I did all that, and she stopped vomiting up hairballs, but was still vomiting up undigested food. It looked like she wasn't even chewing it, just gulping it. She had her teeth cleaned last Friday, and they removed a tooth because roots were showing, so I thought maybe that's why she was gulping food because she couldn't bite down on that tooth. She was fine for about four days, and then the vomiting started up again, so I took her back to the regular vet. They took x-rays because they thought it might be something in her esophagus. It looks fine on the x-ray, but they did find a mass near her heart, which may or may not be related to the vomiting. The radiologist won't be in until Thursday to look at the x-ray, and they'll probably want to aspirate the mass to determine if it's cancerous or not. If it is cancerous, that could definitely cause vomiting, and I'll probably have to put her down because I don't want her to have to suffer through chemo and whatnot, and I don't have the funds for it anyway. If it's not cancerous, they can drain it and see if that makes any difference in the vomiting. It's one of those symptoms that can take a long time to pinpoint the cause since there are a ton of things that could cause it. They may need to do ultrasounds and a tube down her throat to look at her esophagus. It worries me on two fronts – one, all this diagnostic stuff is expensive, and I may soon run out of money to pay for it, and two, I don't like to see her suffer this and possibly waste away from lack of being able to keep food down. All her blood work is normal, as is her heart rate and BP, and she's drinking and using her litterbox, and hasn't lost any weight so far. Until the radiologist reads her x-rays on Thursday, I'm supposed to feed her three or four small meals a day of soft food, like a teaspoonful each time, and before two of the meals, I'm supposed to give her this stuff that is the feline equivalent of Tagamet or Pepcid, since they think she may have some heartburn, which also might make her vomit. I've got towels all over the place, and I try to get her on one so she doesn't mess up the carpet. Sometimes it will be in the middle of the night, out of the blue. It's put me on edge because I'm not getting much sleep since I'm so worried about her and I'm keeping one ear open for her all the time. I hated leaving her this morning to come to work. I'm going home around noon to check on her. This is the part of pet ownership that I dread.