Jill's Journey

This post is a little bit late.  I am currently in my “busy season” at work, so I just haven’t had the time to update.  Which also means, Jill has me freaked out at the worst possible time of year for me.

A week ago I brought Jill to her vet because she had peed outside the litter box again.  This has been happening on and off since she peed all over herself a few months ago, when we had ruled out a UTI.  I would say it would happen about once a week, maybe once every other week.  Now, I DO have another cat as we all know, so is it possible it’s Jack?  I suppose so…but since she did pee all over herself that one time, I’d say unlikely.  So I took her in last Saturday, because I was about to go on the road for work and wanted her looked at before I left.

The urinalysis came back clean for bacteria, but had some red blood cells in it, so it was sent off for a culture.  But during her physical exam, a new problem arose.  She was down to 8 pounds, 13 ounces.  She weighed in at 9 pounds 5 ounces 2 weeks earlier and 10 pounds 2 ounces 6 weeks earlier, so that’s 15% of her body weight shes lost in 6 weeks.  Not so good.

Now the vet asks me, “is she eating?”  Well…I think so?  Jack and Jill are grazers, so I fill their food bowl once a week and they eat from it throughout the week.  I see her go into the kitchen now and again, but do I know if she’s eating like usual?  Well, no….I work a lot, so I’m not home all day to watch her like a hawk.  So is the weight loss due to the fact that shes not eating or something else?  Dont know.

We decide between her regular vet and the oncologist that we’re going to first try to take her off Leukeran (which she has now been taking metronomically for 8 weeks) and see if that changes anything.  It does seem like it would be a big coincidence that the weight loss all started when she began metronomics.  She has had on and off vomiting and diarrhea since being on it, but I started giving her a pepcid with the Leukeran and that had helped.

Now I am watching her eat like a hawk when I am home and I am noticing that she isn’t really eating all that much, but again, I don’t really have anything to compare it to.  Her vet suggested I give her some fancy feast with the gravy in it.  So I got her a can of that tonight and the second I popped the can open her nose was going a mile a minute!  She ran over to it and slurped up every morsel of gravy in there – but didnt eat the meat.  Not so unusual for her, she has never liked soft food.

So, she gets weighed in one week from today.  I’m pretty much terrified.  If her weights gone down, she’ll have to go for an abdominal ultrasound and what that could mean, frightens the heck out of me.  I should also mention, they tested her blood right away and all looked perfect.  Liver function, thyroid, sugar level….like the healthiest cat in the world.

Besides the weight loss, she’s doing marvelously.  Playing, alert, happy…and no peeing accidents in over a week.  So we’ll see…here’s hoping…

Here is Jill slurping up her gravy:

and a pic of her hangin out with her brudda: