Please help my poor, sweet LouLou

My beloved cat that I have had since 2014 when she was just a few weeks old has fallen terribly ill. I need your help to take care of her.

Firstly, let me apologize for my lack of posts over the past few months. I have had a lot of things happening in my life, some of them good (started dating a lovely young lady) and unfortunately, many of them bad (my team and I are imminently being laid off). The most recent of the awful things that has befallen me is that my cat, Louisiana (“LouLou”) fell ill last week.

She began vomiting frequently on Wednesday the 9th and stopped eating shortly thereafter. By Thursday the 10th, she was heartbreakingly lethargic. I took her to the veterinary clinic down the street, and after running some labs and observing her for a few hours, I was able to bring her home with the instructions that if she didn’t start eating or if she resumed vomiting, she would need to be referred to an emergency clinic. She was apparently running a fever and her liver levels were elevated, making the vet suspect pancreatitis, which is apparently somewhat common in cats. The day after I brought her home, her pancreas labs came back normal—initially, that sounded good, but complicated determinations about her malady—but she hadn’t started eating, even though she hadn’t vomited. Consequently, my veterinarian referred her to an emergency department.

The news from that was that while her liver functions appeared to have normalized and her fever had abated, an ultrasound showed an enlarged pancreas and inflamed mid-intestines, lymph nodes, and peritoneum. The best diagnostic course of action was to biopsy the inflamed organs, but the surgery was well outside of my financial ability, especially given that I had just red-lined myself to pay for her previous veterinary visit and the specter of imminent layoffs looms very large for me.

Suffice to say, when the doctor told me that she may have cancer, I was absolutely gutted.

I don’t know for sure that cancer is her ailment, and I am desperately hoping that it isn’t. We’re treating her with antibiotics in case she has a bacterial infection, steroids to tackle the inflammation, anti-nausea medicine, and an appetite stimulant. The hope is that she recovers, at which point we can assume that we don’t need to worry about “the C-word.”

That all said, her medical bills are expensive, and while I’m selling firearms, backpacks, collectibles, etc. my most optimistic estimates for what I can expect to receive from this effort is an order of magnitude insufficient for the cost estimates of the worst case scenario.

If you have it in your heart and your budget, please donate to LouLou’s GoFundMe campaign, which you can find here:

https://gofund.me/b60c25a3

Sharing it among your networks is also deeply appreciated. Thank you; LouLou and I appreciate your support more than we can express.