Flea anemia: you're an asshole if your cat gets this
The patient from yesterday who has severe flea anemia was near death this morning. It was horrible. He needed a transfusion, but we couldn't find a match for him. I was pretty much just standing around watching him die. He was in the oxygen cage, but that doesn't do you much good if you don't have enough blood to take the oxygen where it needs to go.
We'd taken blood from another Turkish Van from the same household (but not related to the patient) yesterday before we were done cross-matching in the hope that surely, SURELY, this one would be a match--the lab told us it was "looking pretty good". We had no other options anyway. After we were finished taking the donor cat's blood, we were informed that despite everything "looking pretty good" earlier, they had ultimately discovered that the donor kitty's blood was NOT a match.
Lovely.
The poor cat started panting and became weaker and weaker until he was just lying on his side with his face in his wet food breathing very shallowly. It was heart-wrenching to watch. (I didn't want to open the door to the oxygen cage, or I would have taken his food out.) It got so bad that I had to stand near his cage and put my face right next to the door and watch carefully to make sure he was still breathing. His chest was just barely moving.
The doctor called the owner to update her on how the cat was doing and give her some options (give the blood we already had and risk having a fatal reaction to it, keep looking for donors even though we were pretty much out of time, euthanasia). She elected option one. So we dosed him with steroids and antihistamines to lessen the severity of any reaction, gave the blood from the other Turkish van that was not a perfect match, and we all held our breath.
His gums turned from white to pink(ish), he sat up, he ate some food, and he drank some water.
When I left work, he was still with us, sitting up, obviously weak as hell but at least looking around a little. We're not completely out of the woods yet. He could still have a delayed reaction. But this is a marked improvement over how he looked around 8:30 this morning.
When I was a kid, my dad and grandpa used to see dogs and cats with flea anemia all the time. Advantage, Frontline, and Revolution did not exist then. Now that we do have those things, there is ABSOLUTELY NO GODDAMN REASON this should ever happen. This client is not poor. She allegedly shows these Turkish Vans of hers. She says she used to be a vet tech. So not only can she afford it, she fucking knows better. You can buy it at fucking Wal-Mart now, for fuck's sake. She could have given all her cats flea treatment--the kind that works, not that Hartz shit--for under $100 instead of spending hundreds, maybe over a grand, on transfusions and renting an oxygen concentrator.
The moral of this story: USE FLEA PREVENTIVE ON YOUR FUCKING CATS. (And dogs.) THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THIS SHIT.
I will post tomorrow about whether the cat survived another night. Stay tuned!
We'd taken blood from another Turkish Van from the same household (but not related to the patient) yesterday before we were done cross-matching in the hope that surely, SURELY, this one would be a match--the lab told us it was "looking pretty good". We had no other options anyway. After we were finished taking the donor cat's blood, we were informed that despite everything "looking pretty good" earlier, they had ultimately discovered that the donor kitty's blood was NOT a match.
Lovely.
The poor cat started panting and became weaker and weaker until he was just lying on his side with his face in his wet food breathing very shallowly. It was heart-wrenching to watch. (I didn't want to open the door to the oxygen cage, or I would have taken his food out.) It got so bad that I had to stand near his cage and put my face right next to the door and watch carefully to make sure he was still breathing. His chest was just barely moving.
The doctor called the owner to update her on how the cat was doing and give her some options (give the blood we already had and risk having a fatal reaction to it, keep looking for donors even though we were pretty much out of time, euthanasia). She elected option one. So we dosed him with steroids and antihistamines to lessen the severity of any reaction, gave the blood from the other Turkish van that was not a perfect match, and we all held our breath.
His gums turned from white to pink(ish), he sat up, he ate some food, and he drank some water.
When I left work, he was still with us, sitting up, obviously weak as hell but at least looking around a little. We're not completely out of the woods yet. He could still have a delayed reaction. But this is a marked improvement over how he looked around 8:30 this morning.
When I was a kid, my dad and grandpa used to see dogs and cats with flea anemia all the time. Advantage, Frontline, and Revolution did not exist then. Now that we do have those things, there is ABSOLUTELY NO GODDAMN REASON this should ever happen. This client is not poor. She allegedly shows these Turkish Vans of hers. She says she used to be a vet tech. So not only can she afford it, she fucking knows better. You can buy it at fucking Wal-Mart now, for fuck's sake. She could have given all her cats flea treatment--the kind that works, not that Hartz shit--for under $100 instead of spending hundreds, maybe over a grand, on transfusions and renting an oxygen concentrator.
The moral of this story: USE FLEA PREVENTIVE ON YOUR FUCKING CATS. (And dogs.) THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THIS SHIT.
I will post tomorrow about whether the cat survived another night. Stay tuned!