Loads of updates, starting with Moose

A lot has been going on in the past month or two so I'll definitely split our updates in to multiple posts. We are "just" getting home from Hawaii and I'm still getting pictures organized. I'm trying to learn how to use Photoshop Elements but it's kind of a lost cause at this point in time. So alas, I will have to just post them the way they actually look... ugh. In looking through all the pictures, I'm surprised that we only took about 200 shots. I figured we had taken many more than that, but I realized that there is only so much you can actually capture on film.

One big update we have is that Moose is much better. Sometime in June we took him back to the vet for one of our "every couple of weeks" visits. He had continued losing weight (his last known weigh before getting sick, from last November, was somewhere around 20 pounds and the lowest he got during the liver failure was just over 11 pounds) and his eyes were still yellow. Seeing Moose go through so much was really quite awful. There were a couple of times that he would start getting better only to get worse again. Mike and I both honestly thought we were going to lose him. Here is how we fed him for almost 3 months (he came to hate it when you walked towards him with a towel knowing he was about to be Burrito Moose):
Our first visit to the vet was April 28th and our last appointment was June 17th. We took him to the vet every two or two and half weeks for that entire time and he was getting VERY slowly better, but not much. On our June 17th visit, the doctor decided to try an injection of corticosteroids as a last ditch effort. He said he had seen once before a cat come in with hepatic lipidosis and after 10 days of seeing no improvement, decided to try steroids with good results. Because we had been seeing minimal improvement each time, the doctor kept putting off the steroids (which, can I say, was by far the least expensive med we gave him throughout the ordeal) which can have sequelae in the way of lowering the immune system or bringing on diabetes for a cat who is already on the brink, among other things. Within a day or two though, Moose was eating through any amount of food we would put out in front of him. We left him in the bedroom with his food, water, and a litter box for a couple weeks just to make sure he was the one actually eating his food (since we saw Trucker and Oliver both eat it at some time or another) and by the time the second week of July came around, we transitioned him to eating where he previously had been in the basement.

One of the things I was most worried about was having to leave him when we went on vacation if we were still having to force feed him. Luckily, Lou didn't have to learn how to force feed the cat. When we got home last week, Lou said that everyone had been eating well and I immediately checked Moose's eyes for the awful yellow color. I'm happy to say that Moose is back to normal, eating any and all food put in front of him, and snoring away just like the night I brought him home... and just to try to prove the point, compare his ears in the two pictures below:

Moose in May - very icteric ears and scrawny with no energy at all

Moose tonight - I could barely keep him still enough to get a picture. Notice the non-yellow ears