My poor kitty

I think I posted a few days ago that my cat has been waking up starving every night between 2-3 AM and that she's going to the vet this weekend for some bloodwork (I assume anyway).  I realized last evening that she really has been progressing this way for months and I've just fed her more.  I first got lazy about measuring out the crunchies, because after the death of my fat cat in Dec. 2008 nobody seemed to pig out too much.  Then I noticed she'd started to lose weight, so I started adding a morning feeding of a small amount of something every day.  Her weight went back to where it had been.  So I decided last night that if she woke me I'd feed her, going against every gut feeling I own, and when she woke me she was STARVING.  So I felt a bit guilty about yelling at her the other nights and as of tonight we instituted a one can for each cat nighttime feeding.  And she is curled on my lap content for the first time in weeks and I hadn't noticed the difference (she was still curling up to sleep with me, but not just coming to me for pets.) In fact my other cat is jealous and just moved from his spot on the mattress to one where his butt is against my arm to remind me HE is HERE TOO.

I'm just going to keep feeding her.  I don't know what else to do until we see the vet.  This can't go on indefinitely or my other cat will be obese (and puking up hairballs) and after losing one cat to what should have be a minor surgical procedure and instead turned into tube feeding, enemas, my baby hiding from me before he feared me pushing food down his throat with a syringe, nasty appetizer plates of atricious smelling crap that cats are supposed to love, and then when he started to seem to rally a bit (yet was still in the horrible stage of waiting to find out if the tube feeding would help him start eating or if it just delayed putting him to sleep), his liver enzymes were so screwed up that on a Tuesday night I stayed with him at my mom's (she could isolate him better than I could) and he was feeling well enough to jump into bed and spent the whole night cuddled with me purring every time I woke up, Wednesday evening I came into the room and he jumped onto the bed to cuddle, and Thursday morning my mother found his body after he bled to death overnight.  I think he said good-bye the prior to nights.  But that made me fear cat obesity, because obese cats are susceptible to the horrible falling apart he had:  a GI blockage from eating plastic (which the vet said defied all odds as it all should have passed because it was small, thin, pieces that should have gone straight through and instead tangled into a knot that then managed to hide on xrays, twice).  Then he had surgery.  But he had not eaten in a few weeks by then except via syringe and he just never started again, which apparently is a fat cat thing.  Then his liver broke down and well, I dont want to repeat the rest.  So there will be no fat cats here, and the younger guy is about to find out about low calorie food if Im going to be increasing his volume.  So now I'll do healthcare all day and all night and weekends.  Yippee........