Our sweet boy, Fish, is in need of a very expensive surgery to remove a mass in his intestines.

This comes after several months of nonstop vet bills to diagnose what is going on. Throughout this, he has been acting almost entirely normal and is still the most food motivated cat I have ever met. All lab results always came back positive, showing him to be very healthy. In the last 6 months or so, we had noticed he was losing weight. The vets showed little concern, attributing it to age.

In January, he had a costly tooth extraction which went very well. We believed mouth pain had made eating dry food painful, leading to weight loss as his diet now mainly consisted of wet food - which he always screams at us for, starting about an hour and a half before meal time. Since the extraction, he has been back to grazing dry food occasionally but gets 2 cans of wet every day now.

In the last month, he was experiencing bouts of diarrhea. In the last few weeks, we found that he was not always using the litterbox, which is extremely out of character for him. We brought him back to the vet and during the check-up, they felt a mass in his abdomen. An ultrasound confirmed that there was indeed a mass. He was prescribed some food that he really loved. This seemed to make his bowel movements more regular, though diarrhea persisted.

On March 16th, we brought him to the hospital to get a Fine-Needle Aspiration of the mass and surrounding lymph nodes to get a better idea of what was happening and what options would be for treatment (if any.) The good and bad news is that results came back inconclusive. The vet recommended next steps are a mass removal which is what we were expecting to do anyway (unless the results had been conclusive in a way that made an invasive surgery unrecommended.)

The estimate we received is double of what our worst concerns were. Any funds raised here will put us in a position where the remainder of the bill is more aligned to our original expectations, especially after so many recent trips to the vet (which have already amounted to a substantial amount.)

Times are incredibly tough right now for everyone and asking for monetary help like this is something I have always tried extremely hard to avoid in the past and I especially want to now. But if there is any chance to help us get our little champion the surgery he needs, it would be immensely appreciated beyond any words I could write here. If that is not an option, please send some good vibes Fish's way or at least enjoy the photos of him we post here. Thank you all so much.