Oh How Pinteresting – the Kitteh Files

So, in my last entry, I wrote how I’d spent an obscene amount of money on one of my cats in a very short time due to her suddenly failing health.  I hate how our animals lives are much shorter than our own. I would much prefer it if they aged along with us, getting old as we get old. Right now I am in the prime of my life and I want my kittens to be KITTENS, still.

No, instead the girls are closing in on 12 years old (they’re sisters) and suddenly they have turned that corner from kitten to old cat.

Bindi decided to remind me in spectacular fashion starting from about two weeks ago when she started hurling up bile.  Now, my cats are regular up-chuckers. They really are. Dugite has been a regurgitater all her life and Bindi has been much the same to some extent, but there was something not quite right with the way that Bindi was being sick so regularly and long before she’d had anything to eat.  Concerned, I took the girls to the vet for a check-up and (after being soundly lectured about responsible cat ownership and how I should have brought the girls in over their vomitousness YEARS AGO, nevermind that we had taken them in to discuss just such a thing repeatedly)… I agreed to get some bloodwork done on the both of them.

The results were mildly surprising.  Dugite came back with the usual low electrolyte rating, as anyone who regularly throws up would do.  Bindi, however, came back with a rather bad case of hyperthyroidism.

Fantastic. That means medication twice a day for the rest of her life and a slightly shorter lifespan than expected.

Unhappy Ren. This is my Bindipuss. She’s not supposed to get sick.

Anyway, nothing else showed up in the tests so we put the sickies down to a change of diet needed and so spent a million dollars on some special food.

Well, the girls didn’t like it.  Dugite would nibble begrudgingly but Bindi stuck her heels in and after the first couple of serves, refused to eat. I tend to have a like it or lump it attitude when it comes to feeding my cats. I will do what’s best for them and I have never bought the shitty supermarket food (always gone for premium stuff) but if I am going to spend $30+ on a 1.8kg bag of cat food then by god they will eat it or they can go hungry.

But then Bindi stopped eating and drinking altogether.

And then she started throwing up more and by more I mean like it got to the point where it was literally six to eight times of an evening and a few attempts at hoicking something up each time. The scary thing was this was nothing but bile and each attack was more and more violent.

The manbeast and I knew there was something very wrong and I took her back to the vet the next morning where they immediately put her on a drip to stabilise her. She was severely dehydrated and had dropped a kilogram in a week. They had her overnight and she seemed to come good. They could find no explanation as to what was happening other than it might have been a reaction to the thyroid meds. We brought her home the next day but by the evening she was vomiting again with gusto.

Back to the vet we went who referred us onto a specialist centre immediately.

Poor Bindi was put back on a drip and booked in to have an ultrasound the next morning.

Gotta give credit to the awesome nurses and vets at Animal Accident Emergency centre in Point Cook, they were pretty awesome and whilst Bindi wasn’t too happy in being there and being used as a fuzzy pin cushion, the manbeast and I felt comfortable in leaving our beloved tubby furball in their hands.

Anyway, long story short, after all the tests and the ultrasounds and a small biopsy, it’s highly likely that Bindi has had a gut infection which has caused her lymph glands to swell (the fact that he found some very swollen glands was bad enough and you can imagine my reaction when the vet started talking about the possibility of intestinal lymphoma) and this has been the cause of the vomiting.  We ruled out a reaction to the thyroid meds as this problem started well before we started her on those.  The vet still hasn’t ruled out lymphoma (*sigh*) but we’re playing a game of wait and see.

ANYWAY…

With all that out of the way, I thought I would cheer myself up with having a KITTEH themed OHP week this week, so do enjoy the pins!