Hello everyone. On November 14th, 2025, our cat Phoebe underwent emergency surgery. She was found to have ingested a foreign material that became stuck in her intestines and without surgery, the incident would be fatal. It has been two weeks since her surgery and she is healing amazingly. However, her life-saving surgery has left us with an almost $10,000 debt that is difficult for us to afford.

I’m currently in graduate school which has taken up a bit of my income the last year and a half. Michael, my partner, has been paying back his school loans for the last six years from both private and public lenders. We weighed many options with Phoebe’s surgery and ultimately, we had to apply for a new credit line with a steep interest rate. If you know us, you know how much we love our cats; we always do our best to care for them and the scary part of all of this is we still don’t know what she ate. The doctors removed what looked to be a two-inch strip of a heavy foam-like material.

Our other cat, Sonny, has experienced this before, which led to his own surgery in 2020 when he was just a few months old. He was diagnosed with PICA — when animals get the urge to eat non-edible items — so we raised both of the cats accordingly. We have to be mindful not to leave items out that they might eat; we limit certain rooms from their access like the bathroom because they like to chew on the shower curtain; we store toys away after playtime; and we have to warn houseguests every time to ensure they follow the same rules. We’ve been doing this for six years since Sonny was diagnosed. In 2020, his surgery cost a little under $1,500 — Phoebe’s surgery in 2025 is literally more than six times the cost of Sonny’s surgery in 2020. We have done our best to prevent this but unfortunately, here we are.

If you’d read this far, please consider donating. Anything helps including sharing our post. We love Phoebe and did everything we could to keep her around, so we hope in this vulnerability you can help us. Thank you!