I am so sorry. We all hope our kitties will live to be 20 but unfortunately it doesn't happen very often.
Oh, I'm so sorry you lost your boy. How sad, gosh. NOT what you were expecting it sounds like.
I took my Little Moe to the VCA Vet Hospital in Albuquerque, NM on Montgomery st. to a specialist/internist (Phil Ries) and had an ultrasound done and a consult, he said that his gallbladder was super enlarged and stretched out he told me it might not be anything serious and that in surgery they could take the gallbladder out and could take his bile duct and reroute the bile direct so the bilirubin would be eliminated, made it sound like a route operation. Then he brought in a surgeon specialist named Collin Wolfe who assured me he could do the operation easily. So I agreed and had to go to a part of town and get yet another title loan on my Van and I used my life saving to pay for everything beforehand. Before I left to drive back to Truth or Consequences, NM which is almost 200 miles I visited with Moe, I had to leave after 10 minutes as a shift change was going on. The last sight and memory of Moe was him going nuts standing up against the cage meow and yelling and I could swear in my head I heard him says "daddy, don't leave, Daddy Please don't leave me!" I had that picture in my head the whole drive home and to this day. I called through-out the night as it's a 24 hour clinic for updates and they were all good. I received a call in the morning of Wed. Oct 8th saying he was being prepared for surgery and I lay on my bed praying with Moes brother Larry and my older boy Shemp. Sometime after 12 noon I received a call from the Surgeon Dr. Wolfe saying that when he opened Moe he found a huge tumor that involved his bile duct, gallbladder and possibly liver he said he could remove the tumor which they believed was benign. I said well I brought him in here to cure him so go ahead and remove it. I received another call soon after from him and he said that he removed 80% of the tumor but said that there was nothing left to be able to route the bile, he said that the tumor was still in the liver nodes and no gallbladder and no bile duct left, so he wanted to put Moe down at this point. I asked about transplant or anyway to save him and he seemed to be in a rush to get this over with. Moe had been so alert and alive and amazed the doctors and staff that he was even sick at all. I couldn't bring myself to give permission to euthanize him and of course broke down, they had to overly convince me to say yes especially after they were so confident beforehand that they could easily fix him. So since they couldn't bring him out of the anesthesia and him being alive I had to agree. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do as I loved him with all my heart. I just feel that when I brought him to my vet in Las Vegas, NV back in Nov. of 2013 and had an ultrasound and biopsy that if it has been properly diagnosed and if I was told then he needed to go to a specialist and have surgery that the tumor might have been small enough to be removed successfully. So I lost my little baby/friend on Oct. 8th, 2014 at the young age of 8. He was so special and was loved by everyone and I feel like my heart was torn out. Moe was born Aug. 28th 2006 and Passed on Oct. 8th, 2014. Before this I had given my job up so I could do the feedings every 3 to 4 hours. So now, I have no job, am out thousands of dollars and most importantly I lost my Lil Moe! It would have been all worth it had Moe survived.