From Dr. Werden:

Ever had a sinus infection? How about an ear infection?

How about BOTH? How about BOTH for at least FOUR YEARS, and nothing the doctors did, helped you for anything more than a short period of time?

I have spent the last 4 years doing everything I can to help Jeanette, lovingly known as Boogers. She spent many years here at the clinic and was well known to our clients. She was the tiny grey kitty who loved everyone, slept on her window hammock up front in the sunshine, and sneezed boogers everywhere.

I was hoping that she'd have less struggles with boogers if she wasn't around so many cats, even though she's now around way less people and probably gets less than her desired amount of attention and pets, so I took her home as a foster a while back. She spends her days in my bedroom with Fantasia, who is her friend. She got fat, she seemed happy, but the boogers just kept getting worse. I've tried various dose of steroids, oral steroids, inhaled steroids, various antibiotics (oral, injectable, and inhaled), and the boogers just get worse and worse.

She blows literal snot slugs everywhere, all the time. The slugs are blood and pus and mucous. Her nose is crusted shut with bloody boogers all the time, even though we clean it as often as we see it plugged up.

The shape of her facial bones is starting to change from the chronic sinus infections.

And yet, she still plays. She still loves. She still begs for attention and adores my oldest child because he also loves her. (Maybe it's because they both always have boogers, but I digress...)

Last week, Jeanette stopped playing. She stopped eating. She stopped snuggling with her favorite floofy booger-catching blanket, and I found her sleeping in a corner on the floor. She didn't get better with fluids under the skin and pain and nausea medications, so I brought her in and we put her under anesthesia to flush her sinuses again, and to take skull rads.

She felt SO MUCH better after that. She felt so good, in fact, that she kept me up for several nights begging me for pets. She keeps eating all the food I put out for the girls to share all by herself.

But that temporary improvement is starting to fade and I know that we have to find some other way to help her.

After consultation with several different specialty groups across the country, everyone agrees that our next step for Jeanette is another CT to see what the structure of her nasal passages, sinuses, pharynx, and middle ears look like and if she might be a candidate for surgical intervention. She might not be, but we have no idea if major surgery has the potential to help her without a CT. And without the information a CT can give us, we have no idea what kind of surgery or surgeries might be options, nor how much they might cost.

I called the local CT facility, and they can get her in as soon as Thurs 5/29, but it's going to be $1,600 for the CT alone. We already spent several hundred last week with anesthesia and all the things we did to help her feel great (for a little while), so we cannot do the CT unless we can raise the money for it.

After that, we know if there's hope to make her better. If I can't make her better for longer, I need to face euthanasia for her. I myself have suffered from chronic sinus infections and I cannot understand how she's so... functional?... Nearly normal?... So damned sweet and loving?... with the magnitude of the infection in her face. I can't do that to her. I can't put her through more of this without an end in sight.

So please. Please consider helping. Please consider donating for Jeanette and selfishly, for me. This cat deserves more.

I am posting this to my own page as a private plea because the rescue has so much going on right now and we have so many terrible and serious and emergent cases and how can a sinus infection possibly compare or take priority over a pelvic fracture or a tongue that's rotting off, but she is important. She is special. She is deeply loved and one of the most loving cats I've ever met.

Please.

CT for Jeanette

By The Cats At Longstreet

CT for Jeanette