Have you been in the situation when your vet doesn’t or can’t get a grip on your cat’s health problem even when they are the best vets in the area? If your veterinarian is excellent but is unable to diagnose a health problem, it is frustrating and worse. Do you feel helpless? What do you do? You are on your own.
I am not referring to feline illnesses which are incurable and terminal. Obviously no one can fix that. What I am referring to is a cat who is not that old but who has a condition that is being treated but the treatment simply controls the symptoms but not “cure” the illness.
I wonder about these situations. Does it mean that the knowledge of the veterinary profession is limited too much? The answer to that depends on how frequently this situation occurs. I have a feeling it is not uncommon.
The problem may not be about the limits of knowledge of veterinarians. It may be about cat owners being unprepared to spend lots of money on diagnosis. The tools to diagnose feline illnesses are in place but are cat owners prepared to spend their money to use these techniques and facilities to get to the bottom of health problems?
The reason why I am discussing this topic is because my cat Charlie may have a piece of grass in his nose but he may have cancer. His left eye waters. He had a bacterial infection in his sinuses but antibiotics fixed that. The infection may have been caused by a foreign object. It is not clear.
I am waiting and watching to look for signs that help to clarify why his left eye is watering, Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to know why his eye was watering and to fix it?
I have not skimped on expenditure. He has had dental treatment (2x) and X-rays. His nose has been flushed out etc.. The X-ray was inconclusive. It may be cancer but the only way to confirm that is to wait for a swelling on the face to appear. Is this a good thing?
I am waiting and wondering whether he’ll just die on me. I wait for him to fall over gasping for breath or making a weird sound, the sound of death. Is this good enough?
Have you been in a similar situation?
Thanks Ruth. I do imagine the worst. Some nights when he is very quiet, either next to me or in the next room, I think he has died (just me being pessimistic). I’d like to get a handle on this, one way or the other. We are both in limbo and I don’t like to see him in discomfort. Although it is slight. Thanks for the prayers.
By the way Ruth, have you received the cat food for review?
Poor Charlie! Poor Michael, as well. It is probably worse for you as you are so worried about him. It could be cancer. Then again it could be nothing. It is so easy to imagine the worst and assume it must be the worst. I will pray for a good outcome. All is not lost. Stay hopeful, Michael.
I am really sorry to hear about Charlie and this kind of situation makes me terribly sad and afraid every time. Specially when people like me have to carry on with no vet service. It is always the instinct that goes ahead and saves the cat or just bye bye with that innocent fellow. 🙁 not to say more but can only pray some thing positive to come out of the CURE, ofcourse. Ameen.
Firstly I am so sorry to hear about Charlie. It must be horrible for you watching and waiting….. if you can’t bear it what about a specialist?
I know its not quite the same but when Mr Jinks broke his leg in 2 places 1 break was in his shoulder so the vets the CPL use couldn’t simply plaster because it wouldn’t have stayed on. They operated and he ended up with an ex-fix and cage rest.
We had booked to go away so after 3 weeks my friend had him for a few days but we had to come back early because he had escaped his pen (sad to say was my friends fault for not following simple instructions) and the ex fix had moved so he had another operation to take out one of the pins.
All I seemed to get from the vets between Xrays etc was we can’t do anything else the fracture is too unstable. We can’t re-position the ex fix or remove it for the same reason. They relied a lot on Xrays.
It healed eventually but was crooked and his leg splayed out when he sat and walked.
Just to note the CPL paid for all his treatment.
Well the vets pushed me towards amputation all along but I was regularly in touch with the CPL so when the vets said only other option would be a specialist and they recommended one the CPL said yes because he had already been through so much they wouldn’t amputate. we just wouldn’t give up.
The specialist kindly operated; everything included for £800 instead of £1500. When I took him for his referral the specialist said the fracture wasn’t unstable at all it had just healed crooked. He said ‘If this was straight I would be sending you home’.
Well he did the surgery which was nearly 8 weeks ago now, Jinks has a plate and 8 screws and he hasn’t looked back! The specialist was amazing and Jinks is incredibly lucky I’m so glad that we didn’t listen to the vets and end up opting for amputation.
I know I’ve gone around the houses to explain but basically the vets (not specialists) have a general knowledge; not a in depth one and I don’t think they like complicated surgeries (the specialist said when he operated he had to carefully peel a nerve off the bone that the vets had left there!) Luckily Mr Jinks suffered no nerve damage. I also know that you can’t get the whole picture from an Xray so what I’m saying is sometimes your vet just isn’t up to it.
I had a Bengal with a similar eye problem which the vet diagnosed as being caused by grass seed getting in there. The problem with that is she had never been outside. It slowly progressed to the stage of having difficulty eating but never-the-less ate a lot but continued to lose weight. She was finally put to sleep as that seemed to be a typical case of cancer somewhere in the cranium. She was finally skin and bone. Some grass seed! The Vet was useless.
Then there is the case of Isadora who had chronic diarrhea. The lab results came back, candida albicans fungus and trichonomas. This is typical of a human patient, and anyway the treatment with Flagyyl didn’t work, so it was obviously a lab mix up. I then discovered switching to canned food (no carbohydrates) stopped the diarrhea. She was alright for while but then got very thin with a distended abdomen. The vet said she had abdominal gas! Not a very clever diagnosis when she was all skin and bone with a distended abdomen but weighed 4.30 kg. That was obviously liquid a clear sign of feline infectious peritonitis. I started her on dexametasone ant-inflammatory medication 10 days ago , and she is doing pretty good now. She has been like this for 4 months when most cats with effusive FIP die quickly. Maybe she is going to be one of those extremely rare cases of a cat surviving FIP. She is lively and noisy again and jumps around quite happily. When she starts putting weight on again without the bloated stomach I will know she’s made it. Anyone who has to rely 100% on the vet is in deep trouble.
Wow, yes. My cat Oreo has noisy breathing since kittenhood and even scoping his throat showed nothing remarkable as the cause. (my dog is also having breathing issues)It’s incredibly frustrating to wait for a new symptom to arise that will hopefully help diagnose them. I’m grabbing my camera often and photographing/filming symptoms and emailing them to the clinic. It’s hard to spend all the money on diagnostics only to come up with no answers, except to rule certain things out.