What do you do when a feral needs $2,000+ surgery?

[Whenallhellbreakslose]

Just looking for other people’s experiences. What decision you made, and why. Or what you plan to do if the situation comes up.

We have a sick feral we recently trapped. He’s FIV+, and we’ve been treating several infections.

One of the infections resolved enough to allow our vet to finally see that he has an inflammatory polyp in his ear that will require surgery.

The places that are equipped to do this surgery here are limited, and the first place today quoted $3,500-4,000 (which I am fairly sure is above average unless there are other complications about his specific case they didn’t tell me/I didn’t understand). We have an appointment with another place on Wednesday.

I’m just struggling. Our own cat is also about to have a very complicated surgery with a dental surgeon that will be in the thousands. And we have ~20 cats we’re trying to spay/neuter and doing this surgery will almost certainly force us to put off TNR for 6+ months even with CareCredit.

We’re not able to adopt this cat ourselves (as we’d planned/hoped) due to the FIV either, which means I need to find a home for him (once socialized), which will of course be far more difficult with the FIV.

We love this cat. He’s the first cat in our original colony and we’ve been after him for so long, but this is so hard and we’re not really sure what to do. I’m just so sad.

Hello Moxiewild, I was just wondering about PK. How has things been going? Were you able to raise any of the funds needed? I hope everything is coming together. You are in my thoughts. Hang in there.