[Wolfpack]

For those seeing this thread bumped, I apologize in advance for bringing and sharing my sadness.

Having said that, being the reserved type that I am, I've always preferred cats to dogs. I never had one growing up (dad was always afraid they'd ruin the furniture or the carpet--he's right, they do), but when I graduated from college, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I decided we'd get two cats together. We opted for pure-bred cats over strays and wound up with a Maine Coon and a Bengal. The Maine Coon, Josh, has always been a somewhat reserved, but very lovable ball of fluff, sort of like myself, while the Bengal, Max, was more high-strung, emotional, and loud, sort of like my wife (not that my wife is loud as such, but she is much more talkative than me). They've been our children before we had children, but they're now grandparents in cat parlance at 14 years old. As our children have grown up, they also have come to love those two cats.

Sadly, however, it looks very much like we are going to lose Max in the very near future. He'd always been a high-energy cat, but he definitely had begun to slow down in recent months. In the past couple of months, he actually started to get a bit thin. We thought maybe he wasn't eating his food as well as he used to, so we tried switching to smaller, easier-to-eat kibble and he seemed to come back a bit, but in the past two weeks, he has drastically worsened. We were away all Thanksgiving week and on Friday, we got a call from my wife's friend, who was caretaking for the cats while we were away. She said that Max looked really skinny, wasn't really eating his food at all and she hadn't found more than a cat's worth of waste in the litter boxes. We were concerned, but I said it was likely because Max, being the picky eater that he is, was probably not interested in what probably was stale food. Nonetheless, we came home as planned on Saturday with my wife and I both hoping that nothing bad really did happen. We actually couldn't find him for a few minutes after getting home, but he did turn up eventually. Unfortunately, the caretaker was right. He wasn't doing very well. He seemed to be walking more stiffly in his hind legs and he had a lot of trouble eating the fresh kibble I gave him, usually dropping it out of his mouth after trying to crunch on it. He was even skinnier than he was when we left for the trip.

Thinking (and perhaps wishfully at that) that his old teeth were making it difficult to eat hard food, we tried to switch him over to moist food this past week and while he did eat some, he wasn't close to eating a full amount for a normal cat. Though his eating gave some hope that he'd perhaps recover some, I started thinking it was unlikely Max was going to survive to see his 15th birthday next summer.

As the week went on, however, those hopes faded as he continued to lose interest in the soft food as well, until today when he pretty much didn't eat anything at all. He's been drinking water, but that's pretty much all he's ingested. His hind legs really seem to have seized up on him as he has basically (when he's moved at all) been hobbling around from place to place.

At this point, we probably will take him to a vet tomorrow. Given his age and what seems to be the advanced state of his decline in health, unless there is a simple solution, we will be facing the difficult choice of putting him to sleep. We've already begun grieving over it. This is going to be hard.