I just got off the phone with the Vet...

My cat, Pooh, has been acting out since I brought Alia home from the hospital. Or at least I thought she was acting out...

She's been howling all day and all night long. She won't eat. She's obsessed with water....crying at every faucet for me to turn it on so she can drink from it rather than her bowl....but that's nothing new for her---she's always preferred to drink from the tap. Perhaps this is why I didn't even consider that it could be symptoms of an illness...a more serious illness.

Since Alia came home, my hands have been full...literally and metaphorically. If I'm not holding the baby, I'm fixing a bottle, doing laundry, folding laundry...you get the idea...I'm a housewife with a new baby...I'm busy. So for that reason, I haven't really been holding Pooh as much lately. And day before yesterday, when I picked her up, I noticed she'd dropped a serious amount of weight...my cat, who used to weigh around 12 pounds may now only weigh around 6. And since Ajay is the one who feeds her in the morning, I didn't think to ask if he's noticed a decline in the amount of food she's eating. Oh, and Pooh has really long hair, so it wasn't really noticeable.

So like I said...I talked to the lady at the vet. She told me cats don't howl or stop eating because of a new baby...those are symptoms of illness. And animals don't really howl and meow like that for fun or attention...it's a sign of weakness and would attract prey or something like that in the wild...

I feel terrible. I feel like all this time, Pooh has been trying to tell me something and I've been chalking it up to her losing her thrown and being ousted by the baby. And now I feel like a really lousy pet owner, entirely preoccupied with my baby, so much so that I didn't even think about the possibility of her being sick until just now.

So today I'll take her to the vet when Ajay gets home from work. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is not something terrible, but I feel like there's a lot of writing on the wall that I just haven't seen until now.