Save Fizzgig: Urgent Dental Care Needed

Tennyson Hull is organizing this fundraiser.

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My beautiful little Fizzgig needs help, and I am falling short on being able to provide it. This picture was taken just a little over a month ago of her in picture-perfect health.

She is about 13 years old and has been greatly loved and cared for all that time. I have tried to brush her teeth over the years, but she has resisted every time. I'm just finding out about annual teeth cleaning, and let me tell you, if you don't already do this for your animals, I would HIGHLY recommend it. I will be doing this for my pets going forward.

About a month ago, I noticed that one of her teeth was bothering her. At first, it got pretty bad pretty fast as she started reacting a lot to the pain whenever she tried to eat. I found increasingly soft food for her to eat and settled on a particular brand and those wet treat tubes. Then, for a little while, it seemed to get better and looked like something that might improve over time, but that hope was soon dashed as she started drooling and became unable to groom herself.

Last week, she was down to mostly only being able to eat the tubes, and over the weekend, she started refusing even those. Today, I started forcing the tubed pate into her mouth, and she has been swallowing it and looking grateful for the food, but still resisting. I hope she will continue letting me force-feed her like this, but I am still worried.

I gave her a bath over the weekend. I should have thought to take a picture of her before her bath because she was in a miserable state, but luckily the bath did improve her quality of life quite a bit. Before, I think her inability to clean herself was bumming her out at least as much as the pain. She is normally a very fastidious cat.

I took her to the vet last week and got a quote of $1500 if only a single tooth needs to be extracted, but $4500 if a full mouth extraction was needed. I have been calling around, but most have been not much better than that. I have a few more places to call tomorrow to see if I can find an appreciably cheaper place.

I am the kind of person to pull myself up by my bootstraps and figure out how to make things work with what I've got. I would normally never ask for money, but I don't know what else to do, and I figure I can't go wrong by doing what I can to save her. My original plan was to bid on some extra contracts, hustle my butt off, and bring in the needed money over the next couple of weeks to cover the cost, but Fizzgig's dwindling ability to eat has me extremely alarmed.

I know she is not the youngest cat, but I believe she still has a few good years left in her if given the chance. I want to take her on a road trip and introduce her to the snow and show her many more years of a good life, but I fear her end is near if I don't do something soon.

I know there are a lot of important causes to support right now, so I understand if you pass this one by. What is the life of a single cat in the face of huge fires and other devistation. Never-the-less I appeal to the animal lovers out there who have extra to share. If you can spare even just a couple of dollars to help Fizzgig get back to her glorious self, I will be forever grateful.