Bubba

I thought I'd fill everyone in a little bit about what happened with Bubba. It's still kinda hard for Mike to talk about. If you didn't know, Bubba had diabeties. He was diagnosed this July with it and our vet told us that he might live another couple of years with it but it's just hard to tell at that point. We've been giving him shots and feeding him special food since that point. Over break we went to Florida and he was being boarded at the vet since he has special needs. When we got him home he was acting a little different but we just didn't think much of it because he still seemed to have a lot of energy and was eating normally. About 2 days before he got really sick he was acting very hyper right before his shot times and I was thinking he probably needed to visit the vet again soon to see if he was still getting the correct dose. Well, before I could call he basically went into a diabetic coma in the middle of the night Sunday. It was horrible to watch and I'll spare you the details. But he was unresponsive for several hours and things we were reading online were saying there could be brain damage if this goes on too long. Basically that's what happened. Bubba made it through the night and Mike rushed him to the vet first thing Monday morning. Our wonderful vet was able to get him more stable but in the end Bubba was not able to use his back legs and had gone blind. We don't know about his mental capacity but I'm thinking it just wasn't going to be the same.

Mike went to the vet Tuesday afternoon to be with Bubba one last time. We were really worried that we did something wrong and that caused all of this. Our vet said that he noticed that some things were not quite right while Bubba was being boarded over Christmas. The vet had also mentioned to me at Thanksgiving when I picked him up that Bubba was looking old and I thought then that he was trying to prepare us for a shorter time with the cat than we originally anticipated. Mike asked him about all of that and he confirmed my thoughts. I know now that we did everything we could have and the vet did too.

He was a good cat. His real name was Karl but Mike had always called him Bubba as a nickname. After Libby was born we started calling him Bubba all the time to keep her from confusing him from Earl (our dog). He was always a pretty self-sufficent cat. He liked to keep to himself most of the time but he and Zeb really got along pretty well. Zeb and Earl are handling this much better than I expected and Libby is getting there. I think she'll be asking about him off and on for awhile. I just keep telling her what happened and hope that she'll understand. I am glad that her first real experience with death is a pet and not a close family member or friend.