Smokey showed up at our back door roughly 2 months ago, mostly likely with nowhere else to go. He is such a sweet lovebug and he got along well with our other animals, so we decided to keep him as a companion for our special needs kitty, Nimo. Well, last night (Sunday) he was acting strangely; wouldn’t eat dinner, hid in the corner under the bed, was panting pretty hard. With my veterinary background, I knew this was urgent, so I took him to Veterinary Emergency Group in Elkridge, but nothing could have prepared me for what they were going to tell me that night. Not only is Smokey severely anemic, as his RBC and platlets were both very low….but they are thinking lymphoma also, due to a high WBC and a high lymphocyte count. Now, he just recently got a clean bill of health; this all happened so quickly. The ER vet wanted to give him a blood transfusion but that would have been over 1k; I wanted to get the pathologist report to confirm whether it’s cancer before putting him through all of that—because if it wasn’t going buy him much time, I just couldn’t stand to put him through that. He was wailing last night the 2nd time he did bloodwork; he peed everywhere and they had to burrito/muzzle him. He was extremely stressed, and I felt the best thing to do was to take him home with medication and let him decompress while we waited for the pathology report. He has an appointment with his regular vet on Tuesday, Sept 30th so we can establish the next steps. We absolutely hate to ask for money, but we feel he deserves a fighting chance. He’s just a baby (we are unsure of his exact age but thinking around 10-12 months) and I just feel like we are being robbed of our time together. If he can keep living without suffering, our goal is to give him that.