Freud took a turn for the worse last weekend so we took him to the vet on Monday. He has kidney disease in addition to his mitral valve disease. The vet gives him months rather than years to live. I felt a tremendous amount of grief about this this week which is sort of strange because he didn’t really have years to live anyway with his congestive heart failure as bad as it is. But he still looks so well and has such a good quality of life that I just thought his heart might defy the odds.

He spent a few days at the vet on IV fluids and they did find he has an infection in his kidneys which may have caused the disease or vice versa. They don’t really know. But 6 months ago, when he had an ultrasound after the dog attack, his kidneys looked fine and his blood results were normal. That ultrasound after the dog attack did reveal pancreatitis and a tumour on his adrenal gland. Quite strangely, the tumour has decreased in size substantially, which the vet finds puzzling and the pancreas now looks completely normal.

The course of action now is a very low-protein diet and subcutaneous fluid injections once a day. He doesn’t like the Hills low-protein renal diet and it’s frightfully expensive anyway so I’m cooking a recipe provided by my vet.