Save Na’Toth: Urgent Medical Funds Needed

Hello and thank you in advance for reading!

This is our sweet Na’Toth, a. k. a. Princess Sprinkle-Nose First of Her Name (whether it be sand, food in her bowl, or snow - just let her get her nose in it!) and the tenderest nose-kisser! From the day we got her as a baby in October of 2019, she captured our hearts and brought so much love, devotion and joy into our lives. She and her little four-legged “brother” truly became members of our family, sharing our ups and downs, adventures and relaxing times, sleeping in our bed and sharing snacks (we LOVE bananas!).

Recently Na’Toth has become ill. It started with urinary incontinence some time back and she was prescribed medication for it. She seemed to be doing well and then all of a sudden she wasn’t - the incontinence went from almost zero to ten and beyond, she started drastically losing weight and acting weak/tired at times.

We’ve addressed everything we could with our local vet (we live in a small town, so their resources are limited, although they did send one of the labs to Michigan State University). We know she had an extremely high level of calcium and a very low level of phosphorus. They said the tests showed she did not have hyperparathyroidism (one of the most common causes of that). The x-rays did not show any definite tumors, although there “may” be something in the area of her thymus (but the vet was not willing to call it a tumor, saying it could have been some accumulated fluid or fatty tissues) and her liver is larger than normal, but the vet said it could be just that - a larger than normal liver. Long story short, we know a few things she does not have, but we still have no clue what she does have, we only see her melting in front of our eyes.

At this point, the vet says they’ve checked for all the most common things and it would take a lot more involved and expensive testing, including needle aspirations (the vet sent some of the pricing and together it was 1,200 US dollars), CT scan (which by itself, from what we see online, could be anywhere from 1,200-1,500 US dollars with some quoting up to 3,500 US dollars), etc. She says this is beyond what they can do and we should go to one of the bigger clinics (about 150 miles from us and we don’t know how many trips it would take).

What scares us the most is that this is just the preliminary testing. We don’t know what will be found through that testing and if it is going to be something curable and if it is, how much that is going to cost. We do know that we don’t want to lose our little precious girl! Please help us!

We are setting the goal at 5,000 US dollars in hopes that it will be enough to cover any and all necessary testing to find out what is going on with her. If some treatment is going to be needed and there is money left from that amount, it will go towards that, of course. If more money is required for treatment… we will see down the road. If it does, however, turn out that we do not need to use all of that money on her (for a bad reason or, hopefully for a good one), the rest of the money will go to the local no-kill Animal Shelter.