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?
Sorry to hear about charlie.. I had a similar problem with my 16 yr old cat goldberg..
he started having a runny eye in january of this year and the vet said allergies.. gave me an eye drop. ( Im a pharmacy tech) I know lots of meds and their effects.. well about 2 weeks later he started to develope a lump in his eye socket. it got begger daily.. I took him again to the vet.. they pushed on it real hard and said cancer.. he will have 24 hrs to live.. my husband begged them to give him an antibiotic, if he was gonna die anyway, it would at least feel like we tried to fix it.. 4 days later the lump was gone…and he was still normal.. eating bathroom, everything was the same, normal.. slowly he started to cry a lot.. and he was walking alot and I noticed his legs shakeing and twitching., like nerve ticks.. even at night he couldnt sleep (neither could I ). he started to act like a roomba vacuum.. roaming around the house, falling into things and when he got to a wall would turn around and go another way til he hit something again.. he did this all day and night.. forgetting he was eating and walk away etc.. I finally had to put him down because I couldnt spend the $4000.00 on ann MRI that told me his tumor (if thats what he had) was growing on the inside now.. he went to the rainbow bridge to wait for me on july 28th, today is the mark of one month he has been gone… I wish I knew what he had, and Im still feeling like there was more I should have done to save him.. but the vet was stumprd.. I just didnt want to see him suffer.. I couldnt tell if he was in pain.. I pick him up and he purrs. but he did stop doing some of the daily sitting in the sun stuff.. so my cat was drippy eye to cancer too…. so they say..
Perhaps I will have to kick myself down the road, but you have escalated Charlie’s drippy eye to cancer.
Actually, look at him. Is he suffering at all? Or, are you?
Exactly, R.
How many people just deal with their hayfever without medical intervention?
They just learn how to cope/
Cats are even better at coping.
And steroids kick immune systems out of kilter!
Yet we could just go and get repeat prescriptions every month, no check up. It worries me how many cats are on those pills just to keep the clients happy and to look as if the vet is doing something to help.
Sometimes I think that the veterinarians don’t want to deal with complicated stuff and they just dish out medications to control it. I feel that they want to deal with easy stuff because the easy stuff makes them more money. A lot of people can’t afford treatments and surgery for the more complicated stuff and therefore vets don’t really want to be bothered with them. That leaves concerned cat caretakers in the lurch. I would have thought that they would be unable to diagnose Charlie’s illness with more certainty than they have. And I have excellent vets,
You are so right, R.
You scare me.
Just like humans, cats can “outgrow” allergies, asthma, and a number of maladies.
Immune systems kick -ss!