Me, Backwards

For the last six weeks or so, one of my two cats was occasionally doing its business in the dining room.  It took me until late last week to pinpoint the culprit: Daisy.  Over the weekend I worked hard to clean up the carpet in the dining room and hoped that if the smell went away, she’d go back to using the litter box in the bathroom.  Alas, this wasn’t the case, and in fact it seemed that she was deliberately using the dining room in front of me.  So… time for the vet, and they were great enough to squeeze me in on Monday afternoon.

The first thing we did was weigh her, and she’d lost 3/4 lb. from the last visit.  On a larger cat, not as big a deal - on a cat her size (max weight about 4 1/2 lbs) this is a HUGE deal and I was kicking myself for not noticing it earlier.  Dr. Dalmasso was as concerned as I was with the weight loss, and coupled with her litterbox problems and lack of energy, she wanted to run some tests to see if anything was wrong.  She took blood and urine samples and ran the tests overnight.

Unfortunately, the tests showed that she’s got kidney disease - which is chronic, progressive, and terminal.  In her case, being so young, it’s likely a congenital defect, and it explains quite a bit about her behavior and development.  She struggled to put on weight as a kitten, and was even losing weight at some points in her development. My vet in Seattle focused on digestive issues, and tried different remedies to solve the problem.  It’s highly likely that the kidneys have been the problem all along.

So, of course, this is pretty overwhelming.  Her prognosis depends to some extent on how she responds to treatments, but it could be as little as a few months to as long as a few years.  Today we’re going to try the first option - subcutaneous fluid injections.  I’m taking her in this afternoon to see if she’ll even put up with it, and if so, to learn how to do it myself as the doctor is recommending that she be injected three times per week.  Additionally, I’ll start giving her Pepcid (1/4 of a human-size pill) to reduce stomach acid and hopefully improve her appetite.

If she takes to the injections - and that’s a big if since this is the cat who won’t even consent to having her nails clipped without being scruffed to “sedate” her - then we do that for a few weeks and retest to see how she’s responding.  If she doesn’t, then there are other options, including changing her diet.

All of the options are, of course, changing the very nature of the level of care that she requires.  I am of course wondering how well I’m going to be able to meet those challenges - one of the reasons I got cats is that they’re lower-maintenance pets and fit well into my lifestyle.  Of course, I adopted them with the full knowledge that I’d be caring for them in sickness and in health, but I honestly hoped that I’d have a long time before dealing with the sickness part.   I can’t help feeling some selfish resentment of the situation right now, but of course I want to do what it takes to keep her with us as long as it’s comfortable for her to be around.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Kitteh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.