Hi Mordred,

It's hard to say how long....I'm trying to think when it started. It was sometime she had been hit by a car (believe it or not). She survived it, but all her internal organs had been shunted (pushed) right up and her gut area was caved inwards. It looked like she had lost alot of weight the same day. I had no idea she had been hit, until I saw her that way and her eyes were slightly moving from side to side. I figured something horrible had happened and was scared to pick her up.

I took her to the vet and they confirmed she had had trauma from probably being hit by a car and surviving it. They operated and pulled the organs back down but she was never quite the same after that. I think the scar tissue or the trauma did a bit of damage and her appetite was a big issue from that point on. She wasn't just a fussy cat, she was now a cat who wasn't overly hungry.

So though it seemed ok for a wee while, it started to take effect and she became basically anorexic. I remember being in tears not knowing what to feed her to get her to eat. I tried everything and nothing worked. a friend of my father's suggested raw gravy beef......so I got it and cut it up and this pretty much saved her life.

I fed her on that stuff for years and only bits of canned food and biscuits inbetween. Mostly raw food. So I'd say she started to get mostly raw food from about the age of .... 4 onwards. 10 years worth of it. But I got lazier later and she got more canned food and biscuits, which I now regret. I think she was much healthier on raw food and I should not have deviated, but sometimes she was a pain in the b*tt with her appetite and fussiness and she would too easily go back to almost anorexic state.

In the end, with age, that tendency became much worse and I was very worried. At any rate, as you know, the vet treatments finished her off. No doubt she was in a very weakened state and ageing and that did not help.