Cali update

[jane_dennis]

Mostly good news. She seems to be feeling well enough that she's getting picky about food. For a while, she was "if it's not People Tuna, it's not good enough," but I think we're past that one. She was so overwhelmed with various Cat Tunas/other fishy flavors with added People Tuna water that she finally got tired of the fish taste, and devoured

Comments

[buddykat]

One of my cats is hyperthyroid and does *not* do pills. Happily, they make a transdermal gel of the medicine. Apply it to the inside of her ear once a day, and she's good. She's not thrilled, but it's a lot easier then trying to give her pills!

[jane_dennis]

That's way cool. I've had 2 hyperthyroid cats long term. They both eventually got to the "oh well, get it over with" stage with pilling, but I've had a cat that srsly probably couldn't have been pilled. The transdermal stuff sounds fantastic - and no hiding pills under the tongue and then spitting them out.

[kalimac]

I've never known a cat that could be pilled. At all.

Our underweight senior girl laps up the gravy from the expensive packets of cat food but, until recently, left the nuggets alone. (It's not that she can't or won't eat solid food: she cracks the dry food with relish, but that's not enough to keep her weight up.) We tried feeding her people-gravy, which is considerably cheaper, but no. Smelly cat food only.

[jane_dennis]

Well, some of them can be. With others I'm sure it would be extremely difficult or impossible. There is a technique which our vet showed us that I got quite proficient at, the Pop the jaws open with one hand, Stick the pill in the back of the throat with the other, and bang, they generally swallow as a reflex.

One of the problems I had giving Cali her medicine was that it was a liquid and had to be administered with a dropper. Much harder than giving a pill. And of course once the cat gets a taste of the medicine, she's that much harder to do the next time.

Yeah, Cali is mostly just consuming the expensive gravy. She got very malnourished when she stopped eating the dry food that was left in between cat sitter visits. I haven't tried her on dry food since she's been out here. Probably will one of these days just to see if she'll give it a shot.

[cogitationitis]

When my cat was hyperthyroid, we did a radioactive iodine treatment. It's a bit pricier in the short run. My mother-in-law does the ointment in the ear.

[jane_dennis]

We looked into the r. iodine when Mother Cat was diagnosed back in the early '90s. Cost was well upwards of $3000, and involved a trip to the nearest licensed facility which was at the Auburn (Alabama) vet school. Mother Cat was 17 or 18 when she developed the problem, Miss Q of a similar age in her turn.

I didn't have a chance to price it for Skitter but we would definitely have considered it for her, had the strokes not done her in, as she was young enough (13) that the possibility of many more good years would have weighed in favor of it.