How much is enough?

I talked to the vet today. Our cat is still sick. He's had blood drawn three times in four days. Our vets office thinks the next step should be an internal medicine specialist for a bone marrow aspiration. Procedure is in the $500 range. If we don't go that route, we need to suppress his immune therapy with a differen variety of drugs. This would make him susceptible to other disease and infection. He's a strictly inside cat, so I'm not really worried about that. But, if THAT course of treatment didn't make things better, it would alter his marrow enough that doing an aspiration later wouldn't make any sense at all.

He is just the sweetest cat, and my son loves him to bits. He's 9, so of course his sense of sickness and death is totally different than mine. Poor kitty has been jabbed so much lately that he's been tough for the vet techs to deal with. I have some nice scratches on my shoulder from him trying to escape my grasp yesterday when I was going to put him in the crate to take him to the vet. This protest by him (and, let's face it, $500 is a lot to spend, and what does that set you up to do next if you've gone that far?) makes me hesitant to stick his poor little body any more. He's got bruises on his little legs already. It's so hard to know what would be the right thing to do for all of us.

Top it off with the dog being ill too (vet thinks that it's just a wicked coincidence) and my dither about what to do about them both is at an all-time high. Both are being treated as if they have an auto-immune disease. The stuff that the dog presented with at the first appointment seems to be getting better. She's taking prednisone, eating well, and still losing weight. She came to us from the Lab rescue lady, and we don't have ANY history on her. She may very well be older than we think, and that could be contributing to her ill health. She is my shadow, and I'll be very sad when her time is up. She doesn't seem to be too uncomfortable...she still jumps up when she hears my car keys rattle! Only trouble is that she's a little slower to climb into the car, and getting out of the car causes her to hesitate.

All I can do it care for them one day at a time, and hope it's 'enough'.