We were gone away for 2 days and we had a friend check on him while we were gone and he said he had been eating, but I'm not really 100% sure if he was. I think we were home for 2 days after that, but it might have only been 1. I don't really remember. It all happened so fast.
I only noticed he wasn't drinking because I noticed he wasn't going to the water bowl with the dogs like he usually does, my husband thought nothing of it, but he doesn't really pay attention.
When we got him he was 6 months old and when we took him to the vet they told us he needed to be 8 months old before he could be tested or maybe it was he needed to be 6 months and he was only 4 months...I don't really remember. All I do remember was that he was too young at the time to be tested. When we took him to the vet they told us that since we didn't have any other cats and he was 100% indoor then there was no need for testing, but we wanted to have him tested because well, his mom had tested positive on the FeLV and FIV test. My husband kept putting it off though. We were told that even if we had tested sooner and been told he had FeLV it wouldn't have changed anything because they can't predict how the disease will grow or how aggressive it will be. We were told we were just unlucky.
We have already gotten a new cat and even though my husband didn't like it, we did pay to have him tested for FIV, FeLV and heart worm. Even though he tested negative for FeLV at the shelter, I wasn't willing to risk it a second time. He did test negative on everything.
I wish we had taken our kitten to the vet sooner, but I just wasn't sure if I was right about his lack of eating and lack of drinking. I did find out the day we had him put down he had been using one of the dog beds to urinate on, so he was having troubles. The urine on the dog bed was another reason we brought him into the vet. When I decided to clean it up the next day, realized he had peed on it enough to soak the floor. So that was fun. I wasn't mad though, at him at least, just at myself for not picking up on it sooner.
At the vet he also passed away as soon as they gave him the anesthetic. We should have taken him the day we went to the in laws, but yea, he just didn't show signs the day before we left of being in distress. I feel bad leaving him alone those two days when he was really sick, but he had been eating and drinking and been fine before we went out of town, so there just wasn't really anything to make me think anything was wrong otherwise.
My in laws think that if we had known sooner we probably would have chose the cat over them and not gone to visit them, which isn't 100% true. My husband would have gone and I would have stayed home, which would have pissed them off, but whatever. It pisses them off when we bring the dogs with us and refuse to get a sitter for them, but it's either they come with or I stay behind.
That's kind of how we feel with our new cat, we'd rather all our animals be with us all the time rather than leave them behind and allow something to go wrong. I don't know. We probably shouldn't have got another cat, but the dogs were just so mopey and I really missed having a cat around. So I'm a little selfish...I don't know.
Since then we've become very paranoid about our dogs though, so that's something I guess. Our new cat we're also paranoid about, but he's a really good drinker and eater, he's also very loud when he uses the litterbox, so it should be very easy to pick up if something is wrong and hopefully I'll notice a lot quicker if anything goes wrong again.
I'm not sure if my husband does, but I do still feel really bad about what happened to our kitten.