Basically, at the time of my last update bulletin she did a full recovery and was done with her treatment, she was perfectly good for a few weeks until one of her eyes randomly got really swollen again and it looked much worse than before, we asked the vet about this and he told us to spply her medications again. This worked but the next day it was swollen again, we did the same thing and it worked but the next day, again. Then on the third day it just didn’t go down and the following day it started to get worse. We took her to a new vet (the other one was closed and would not reply to my texts the days before) and they gave her meds for a conjunctivitis diagnosis and some shots. This was on a Friday and she continued to get worse on the weekend. 

On Monday I pressured the new doctor about it and they took her in and sedated her to look beneath the swelling to make sure her eye wasn’t damaged and that it was in fact just the tissue around the eye. Her eye was ok and they did a culture to check for any bacteria, as they believed this was a bacterial infection. They told us we had to wait a whole week for the results, we kept up her treatment and waited until Thursday, but when she started crying blood we knew we couldn’t wait despite the doctors telling us to be patient. 

We took her to an Eye specialist vet and he told us that it was indeed conjunctivitis, but that he did not believe it was an eye problem, but a skin problem that was situated around the eye. Basically it wasn’t just the eyelid as the last vet had said, he took an ultrasound and it was clear she had an abscess in her cheek and he punctured her cheek to drain out liquid. He have us new medications. We saw this vet the next day and she seemed to have some improvements, or at least I thought. He told us to keep giving her the meds and come back 4 or 5 days later but seeing as she got worse and worse over the weekend we agreed to take her back on Monday instead. 

On this vet visit, the doctor gave me the options, which were treatment or putting her to sleep. The second option made me really angry and upset, because she had literally been perfectly ok a week before this.

When he saw her he told us she needed to be hospitalized and that a lot of her tissue was dead, which he mentioned was a possibility on the previous visitation. He told us he would have to remove tissue from her face, which we agreed to since it would spread further if it was not removed. They had her for 5 nights and 6 days. On the first or second day they removed tissue from her cheek, leaving her with a hole about the size of 2 pennies on her cheek. However, this procedure wasn’t too painful because it was dead tissue. They sent the tissue to the lab to check If it was cancer, which was unlikely. On the third day they had to remove even more as it was still spreading (albeit slowly) with her losing at least half of the tissue of the right side of her face. I visited her every other day. She had an IV and was covered in her own pee but she seemed mostly ok. On the fourth day she fully stopped eating. She had been eating small amounts of food up until that point. When we took her home on the 6th day, we hoped she would eat now that she was away from all the vet stress. But she did not eat. During her stay she had become anemic and her red blood cell count was dropping to an extremely dangerous level. I spent about $500 on the hospitalization.

I tried everything, different kinds of wet food, chicken liver, dry food, I tried hand feeding her, wetting her food in broth, etc. and nothing worked. By this point she was emaciated, sickly thin. I had never seen her like that. Up until before the hospitalization she had not lost any weight. Since she was not eating the only thing I could do was syringe feed her a nutrient gel. I had her home giving her her meds and cleaning her injury for 2 days. Yesterday I took her to a new vet as a last ditch effort to save her. The doctor immediately diagnosed her  with herpes virus and gave her the medication she needed. She told us this was the most severe and advanced case she had seen and she could have been diagnosed from day one. As soon as she was given this and an analgesic, she started eating again for the first time in days. 

She could have been diagnosed from day one, her symptoms should have been clear to any vet who treated cats, yet none of them considered it or even told me they didn’t know and just drained me of all my money. She didn’t have to lose half of her face or drop half of her weight. We put so much time, resources and energy into this just for the vets to not do their part. 

She is currently hospitalized, and while her future is not certain, she has a chance to live. So far she has shown a positive response to the treatment and we hope it isn’t too late for her. She has been incredibly strong and resilient through all of this, and she’s still doing her best to survive despite everything that has happened. She still wants to be per, she still purrs and responds when you call her name. She has been an incredibly healthy cat all her life and I am not gonna give up on her, she is everything to me. She has saved my life countless times and I will do everything I can to do the same for her.