News of the Fuzzy Kind...

Well, there's good news, and not so great news...

Shady was taken to the vet yesterday because she's been rather listless, not eating very well, and having hard stool. As she's 20, I got worried about her and decided since I got 3 basic wellness plans with my job, I should take advantage of it for it's free check-up.

I had to drop her off for 3.5 hours so they could do blood, urine and fecal tests on her, and check her out in general. They also ended up doing a thyroid test and a feline leukemia test on her as well, which weren't covered under the plan, but I figured it was worth it.

Turns out, she's dropped 3 pounds in the last 2 years - yikes! While not such a big thing for humans, she's 2/3 the weight she should be for her bone structure.

Her thyroid and feline leukemia tests came back ok, and negative for issues. Her blood work came back fine - no infections and no high white cell count, which means no cancer, either. Her stool showed no parasites, but they did a de-worm just in case.

The issue is with her kidneys. Turns out, she's in the beginning stages of renal failure. Thankfully, we caught it in a period of time that it can be reversed, if I do everything that the vet tells me to.

We've changed her diet over to Royal Canin renal LP for wet food, and Hills Science diet K/d renal for dry. We've gotten rid of all her treats for now, since they're not designed for kidney issues, and I don't want to ruin the treatment at this point.

I also have to give her sub-q injections of a solution to help clean out her system of the excess protein she's had that's causing her kidneys to work so hard. Poor baby has to deal with being poked each day with 50 cc's of it.

She's also getting Laculose and Lactalace to help with the hard stool issues. Her colon's enlarged because she was flushing out all her liquid through her kidneys to try and process the protein. Poor thing.

I did find out that her right eye is partially discolored, but partially it's due to the renal failure - her eye doesn't contract so well anymore, so it messes with her judgement.

The one thing I did NOT like was the doctor I had that day. She didn't seem pleased to be treating a 20 year old cat, and continually talked down to me even when I explained exactly what was going on *in fairly technical terms* to her. She didn't do any better when we were checking out, either. She actually asked me if doing a sub-q routine and taking care of her was something that I *wanted* to do - like I'm going to say no! She's my baby, and she's not in pain, and still feisty. There's no reason for me to say no and decide to put her down. I was really unhappy with that, and I think next time I'm going to ask to see someone else.

I'm to bring her back in in a month, and hopefully by then we'll have fixed it. Meanwhile, I am hoping that everyone sends good thoughts her way.

~M