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Buddy Update: Diarrhea bad, eating finicky to the extreme.
Stacy Horn
I've written six non-fiction books, the most recent is Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York.
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Stacy, when we were trying to feed the cat I wrote about earlier (and probably freaked some readers out), he had feline AIDS.
As a consequence he could not eat and it was driving us all crazy.
We went to a feed store (we lived in a rural area) and purchased some enormously fortified milk that was a little bit like Ensure for animals. This milk had a number of eggs in it, and all kinds of nutritional ingredients.
Our cat was able to ingest this for a while, because all he had to do was drink it, and that was sufficient to get some nutrition down him. I wish I could remember the name. But it’s the kind of thing you can find in some of the feed stores that specialize in the agricultural world. (Of course it’s very possible vets have this or know where to get it.)
Greg’s post reminded me of what I did when Miss Mouse (my 15-year old cat) was on what I thought was her last legs (she’s since recovered to everyone’s amazement).
She refused to eat her Hill’s Science dry food, so I added warm water to her canned cat food until it was like a soup. She would drink a little of that instead of her water and that seemed to get her through her rough patch.
We never did figure out what it was (old age? kidneys? some African ameobic disease?) but she had gotten so bad that I almost took her to the vet to be euthanized.
Fortunately I decided to wait and, lucky for her, as she’s back to her normal obnoxious self. She’s mostly Siamese and probably suffering from kitty Alzheimer’s as she walks around and talks to herself all the time in a Very. Loud. Voice.
Think I might have mentioned this supplement before, but if you haven’t tried Nutri-cal, it might get Buddy eating again. For sure, it will give him some nutrition; if you just put a dab in his mouth or on his nose, he’ll eat it.
Here’s a link for a description of it:
http://dtypetsupply.com/evsco-nutrical-p-186.html
I’ve pulled many an ailing cat out of their slump with that stuff!
Hopefully something will stimulate his appetite soon, but there’s not much going in now to bulk up his stool and his system is taking a beating. Unfortunately, with IBS/IBD as Melissa said in the previous post, there is that chance he might have diarrhea from now on as his new norm. I know, that’s not a good thought and it probably makes you cringe, but my cat had chronic diarrhea for a few years and it just was life as we knew it. Not fun and we (the vet and I) tried numerous remedies to no avail. I think sometimes once the inflammation has taken hold, it’s harder to get it back to normal. Buddy is alot younger than my cat was, so there is always hope! There is a probiotic for cats that your vet should be able to give you feedback on if they think it is worth trying, maybe at a later date. Hang in there!
When I read the good suggestions, mine seems more crazy – but you can decide. When one of my old cats was sick and not eating well (but no diarrhea) at Thanksgiving, I tried some warm turkey gravy – and she loved it. When that ran out, I bought some canned turkey gravy (ick) and heated a little to just warm and she loved that too. Gradually, I added a few bits of her food to the warm gravy and decreased the gravy. I’ve done the nutri-cal too. The probiotic sounds very interesting for the diarrhea. Good luck!
That sounds smart to me.
Oh, and yes, I was giving Buddy the Nutrical before Buddy’s biopsy, when he stopped eating then, probably as a result of your recommendation, Cara.