Some downer news...

My parents have this cat named Henry. He's been with the family for about 14 years - he used to be this huge tom cat that moused around our house and soon turned to bunny sized gofers. As a testament to his character, when he was younger he lost half of his tail in a trap set in the fields beside our house, he came home with basically just a bone covered in blood. The vet chopped off the half that was skinned and he's had a flag of a tail ever since. Within the last year his health has deteriorated rapidly and we were worried he was going to die. The vet couldn't really find anything wrong with him, he was just old. He dropped to just skin and bones, stopped cleaning himself, and his eyes became milky. My dad wasn't prepared to give up without a fight though and began to feed him a lot of other stuff to see what might work. He found out that salmon did the trick, and slowly over the last few weeks he's been working on gaining a bit of weight back and his eyes are clear again. We've been really hoping he'd bounce back.

This morning he was underneath the car and the back half of him was run right over. When my dad first told me he'd been run over, I immediately thought of one of our other cats what wasn't as fortunate and was run over the front half. I was there when it happened and I can never forget that. I was happy to hear that it was just his back half, but I don't know what to think now. He's in such poor health as it is I don't know if he'll be able to do this. Apparently his pelvis is shot, and right now the vet is trying to determine the status of his bladder. It can't be seen on an x-ray which can mean that it was empty at the time, drained, or burst. Other than that, I have no idea what's going on.

I just feel terrible, my dad loves that cat so much. My parents have lost a lot of animals in the time since I've left home, two cats and two dogs, I would really hate for this to be just another loss for them...