Mad Times

Can’t tell they’re siblings, can you?

Alice got her third blood test last Friday and we got the results via voicemail on Saturday. To get the impact of this you have to understand that our vet has sort of a morose aspect at the best of times. Think Eeyore and you won’t be too far off. So imagine our delight when his voicemail used the words “phenomenal” and “amazing”. Our little girl is doing well. Here’s the new numbers against the last two checks:

We haven’t talked to him yet, so we don’t know exactly what this means for her continued health, but it sure looks like a good trend. Based on the exam on Friday we’ve switched her fluid schedule from 100ml daily to 150ml every other day and are monitoring her response to that to see how she does. We’re at the end of the third day of that cycle so it’s a little soon to say. In any event, she’s playful and eating and drinking well. We couldn’t be more pleased.

This is a decent representation of the current balance of power ;-)

Alice is doing very well. Well enough that I think you can assume that she’s doing well unless you hear differently.

Theo isn’t sure what to make of Alice’s return. When she comes near him he hisses. He’s all jumpy. When she gets attention he pouts (never mind that the attention she’s getting is being stuck with a needle and pumped full of fluid.) He’s started spraying the perimeter of the house again like he has done when we’ve had neighbor cats who liked to hang out right by the windows and taunt the poor indoor kitties. We’re trying to balance the attention so he’s cuddled and cooed at as much as Alice. This means that we’re spending almost every waking hour comforting and coaxing one kitty or another. Hopefully everyone will calm down as we get into a routine.

Alice is doing okay. She’s eating. She’s being patient with her fluids. She even drank a little bit in front of us today. She’s played and begged for brushing. All good signs in our book. She’s still spending most of her time in the cubby at the top of the cat tree, but we’re hoping that’s just a response to the trauma of her hospital stay. We’re taking one day at a time as so many people have counseled us.

Thanks to everyone who has sent a note or thought of us. It’s surprising how much those little things help.

What a difference hydration makes! We managed to get Alice’s 100ml administered successfully and she was immediately relatively perky. She ate a handful of food and took a bath and went to sleep in her tower. We’ve started a journal so we can remember the twists and flips of this roller coaster ride. I’ll try to blog less about the individual dips and peaks like these last two entries and more about the overall ride. Just because we’re going through emotional whiplash doesn’t mean you have to!

She’s home, but she’s not all better by any means.

We tried doing her subcutaneous fluids for the first time on our own this morning and didn’t do very well only getting a little bit into her. I did some studying and know what I was doing wrong so we’ll take another crack at it tonight.

She’s still weak and sluggish. She’s sleeping a lot. We haven’t seen her drink water at all, though with all the fluids she’s been getting directly she may just not be thirsty. She’s been eating a tiny bit of the k/d (kidney diet) food we got. We haven’t quite figured out how to feed both of them since Theo will eat that too (though he’s currently turning up his nose at almost everything) and then we can’t tell whether Alice is eating or not. Becky got some food samples from our vet today and let Alice check them all out. While she seemed interested in food in principle (came over when Beck was dishing up the samples) she doesn’t find any of them appealing enough to actually eat some.

She’s breathing a little faster than normal, but the vet suggested that might be to compensate for the anemia.

In some ways this is harder than when she was in the hospital since we have to interpret her actions, not really knowing what any of them may mean. We’re trying to be positive, but it’s pretty scary.

Theo is being a pill and hissing at her whenever she goes near him. He’s been spraying again too. No fun wanting to strangle one of your cats while struggling to keep the other one healthy. Sigh

Alice has been eating well over the weekend and had actually gained a few ounces as of this morning so the vet decided to send her home without even doing another blood test.

We got a lesson in how to administer subcutaneous fluids and will have to give her 100ml per day for ten days, then we’ll do a blood test at our regular vet to see if we need to continue at that level or if we can do it less frequently.

Theo’s a little wigged out since his world just changed yet again, but they touched noses and hissed at each other and are getting used to sharing their space again. We’re very happy to have our little girl back at home.

We talked to one of the vets at the hospital today and got a little more info about Alice’s status. She’s doing quite well. They seemed very happy with the second blood test results. Apparently she’s been happily eating the K/D kidney diet dry food which is a bit of a relief since last we heard she was only eating a little bit. They’d rather she ate wet food since it helps with hydration, but eating is eating. It looks like they’ll do another test Tuesday morning and if she’s continuing to show improvement then she’ll be able to come home! In light of her improvement they’re predicting that we’ll only have to do subcutaneous fluids a couple times a week rather than the daily they’d warned us of when we first took her in.

So the accepted treatment for kidney failure in cats is to put them on a low-protein diet since it’s the protein byproducts that the kidneys aren’t able to filter out of the bloodstream and result in a toxic condition. Plus the fluid therapy to fight dehydration since the kidneys can’t concentrate the urine so they have to put a huge volume of fluids through their system to flush the toxins out.

We’ve talked to one of our alternative medicine friends who pointed out there is some controversy about this approach. The alternate view is that the real problem is with the highly processed proteins in prepared cat food and that what they really need is something closer to their historical diet, i.e., raw meat. This is talked about in a sidebar on felinecrf.com and also by Russell Swift and on this site and this site. We’ll be doing more research and talking to a local holistic vet about this. In the mean time, though, it’s a relief to hear that Alice likes the traditional food well enough and that the fluid therapy isn’t going to be as frequent as we thought it might be.

We got the results of Alice’s second blood test today. The short version is that it’s much better, but still outside normal range in several areas.

We didn’t actually talk to the doctor today but he left us a great detailed voicemail on the results.

Here’s a table with the numbers he gave us:

In addition to those things moving in the right direction the new test also showed her “Hematocrit” at 21 which should be above 24, so she’s mildly anemic (the dehydration actually masked this one instead of accentuating it). They’re treating this with a hormone that stimulates red blood cell creation.

So she’ll stay in the hospital and her next test will be on Tuesday. We’re feeling guarded relief. I’ll talk more about what’s likely to happen from here and some more of what we’ve learned about Feline CRF (chronic renal failure) later.

I took this picture last Saturday. On Tuesday night she was clearly not feeling well so we took her to the emergency vet. They told us that she was severely dehydrated. They did an x-ray and a blood test. They told us that her kidneys were in bad shape.

We left her there at the vet where they put her on i.v. fluids and started a low-protein diet. We’ve been visiting her daily. She has been much better each day. Most of that is just because she’s hydrated again.

On Saturday, they will do another blood test and we’ll get our first idea of how bad the kidney problem really is.

We were pretty devastated when we first heard the news. Alice is only 10 years old and we thought we had a while before we would have to deal with major health issues. We did some reading (primarily on http://www.felinecrf.com/) and have some idea what her ongoing care is likely to entail. We’re just doing the one-day-at-a-time thing and hoping for the best at this point.

I’m planning to start blogging the details here so our family and friends can check on her status and progress (and so I don’t have to spam them ;-). I’ve got some other backlog to get up so it won’t be all Alice all the time here at Mad Times, but the cat content is going to increase for a while.