re: #25 Pawn of the Oppressor

That’s how it was with my recently departed cat. He was going out of the litterbox, and the short answer after having him looked at was “It could be any one of four things, and it will cost you thousands of dollars in tests and invasive surgeries to find out for sure. (Aside: the surgeries might stress him enough to kill him outright) And when we ARE certain, there’s no cure for any of the possibilities anyway.” $600 worth of exam and testing showed nothing unusual in the blood, but his pre-existing heart murmur was worse.

Step 1 was a special “prescription diet” (read: pointlessly expensive cat food), which I declined to pursue after some research - a change to wet simple-ingredient food without starches fixed the butt-related issue and improved the health of both my cats, but about four months later he developed overt symptoms of heart failure, and that’s what did him in eventually.

My vet’s commentary after he died: For cat heart failure, in 85% of cases the first presentation is sudden death. I read elsewhere that the average time between definitive diagnosis and death is five months, which was about how long my little guy made it between showing abdominal breathing and dying rather badly on a Monday night after getting over what I thought was a cold.

I’m glad the problem was diagnosed for less than $1K and it’s great that there’s treatment available. There’s a whole category of kitty killers where the vets just kind of shrug and give you a choice between “do nothing” and “pay half a year’s mortgage payments so we can delay the inevitable if we’re lucky”. I’m glad your kitty’s troubles aren’t in that latter category. :)

I’m pretty sure what our Pumpkin had was diabetes. He was drinking and peeing more than usual, and was getting really skinny—but it has been really hot, and he always got super-skinny in the summer. Maybe if it was winter we would have caught it in time, but we can’t afford a diabetic cat—my girlfriend is diabetic, and we can’t afford her. I feel really guilty but we do what we can do—he was just too far gone by this weekend, anyway. Anymouse, I’m really glad Felix Randomkitty will be all right (I hope).