Jabez, my boo

So, I finally took my kitty into the ER and found out that not only does he have diabetes, but he now has cataracts, gall stones and heart disease.  The vet said that with medication he could probably live like another year or so.  I was struggling with the idea of putting him to sleep and they offered to do it right there and then but I just couldn't do it.  He has been such a great little companion to me the past 12 years and the idea of just ending his life like that, so suddenly, seems really callous and ... fast.

So, I brought him home and have been giving him lots of love and pandering to his constant begging for food.  The thing is he is not really eating his food, he is just licking the gravy off the top and then sitting at the refrigerator door looking soulfully up at me.  Since he is a type 1 diabetic, for him to not eat is not good, so I have been opening the same number of cans of cat food daily but he is only eating a fraction of the food and just licking the gravy off the top.  I've had to cut his insulin dosage down because I almost killed him a few years ago when he stopped eating, like he is now, but kept giving him his usual dosage of insulin.  I came home from work one day to find him basically comatose on my kitchen floor.  I rushed him to the hospital and some thousand dollars later he recovered.  That's when I decided to buy him the glucometer.  Yeah, they have one for cats and dogs.  It's called an Alphatrak and works pretty good but considering his size, and my negatively correlated size (I'm a small person), it just isn't practical to poke him once a day to test his blood sugar.  So, based on the vet's recommendations, I am to give him only 2 units of insulin if he eats less than half his food.

He's lost a lot of weight and I can feel his back bones which had previously been covered with a layer of fat.  I just hope the good Lord takes him home (where ever kitty home is) and I don't have to actually put him to sleep.  I think I might have nightmares about that.  Especially, since my mother had a not so pleasant experience putting her cat down.  I couldn't even listen to her tell me about it because it freaked me out so much. 

Ah well, such is trials and tribulations of having pets, I guess.  Every day I leave and come home I'm half expecting him to be ... not with us anymore.  But so far he is hanging in there.