Plum Crazy

My cat, Jane Eyre (Jane for short), has been a sick kitty. She is a little old lady at 14 1/2, which, as I tell her, explains her grey hair, but up until two weeks ago, she had never been sick a day in her little kitty life.

She was vomiting clear liquid, which was odd. The second time she did it in 3 days, I took her to the vet. The vet suspected she was in kidney failure, not uncommon for cats her age, so we took some blood tests. The creatine level was a smidge high (0.1 ml), so the vet determined that it was probably the very early stages, requiring only a change in diet. She also recommended an ultrasound to help determine how far advanced the kidney failure was.

The ultrasound confirmed that she was in the early stages, but turned up something else surprising. When doing a physical, the vet couldn't feel any tumors. Lo and behold, the ultrasound showed a small tumor in the stomach, so small that it wasn't possible to feel from the outside. Lucky, because this meant Jane was in the very early stages of cancer, making her prognosis for remission good. A biopsy showed it was lymphoma, which generally responds very well to chemotherapy.

So Jane got her first course of chemotherapy a week ago Tuesday. It turned her appetite a bit, not surprisingly, but she was eating for the first three days after the chemo. Then she stopped eating last Friday night. She would only take a little milk. She threw up the appetite stimulant the vet gave me, although she does keep down the Prednisone. Saturday morning she wouldn't eat anything either, so back to the vet. She got a shot of some kitty Pepcid and a bottle of kitty Pepto Bismol for use at home. I also got some high-caloric food (Hills Prescription Diet A/D) which she would hopefully eat on her own, but if not, instructions on how to force-feed her and some feeding syringes. She wouldn't eat it on her own, so I mixed it with some water and force-fed her for the next week. She threw up the kitty Pepto Bismol too. The only medications she would keep down were the Prednisone and kitty Compazine.

Because she wasn't eating on her own, the vet wasn't sure whether she wanted to give her the second course of chemo, so she took another ultrasound. This showed that the tumor was gone and the stomach lining was thin. So her refusal to eat was a mystery. Finally, yesterday, the vet gave her a shot of valium, which in small doses acts as an appetite stimulant in cats. And boy does it ever. One minute later, she was eating. I took her home last night, after she got IV fluids for the day to help hydrate her, and she was eating. She has been eating all day today.

She'll restart the chemo on Tuesday. Even though the tumor is gone, the cancer is probably still in her lymph system, so we want to be sure we put her in total remission. Believe me, though, if she won't eat again after that, I won't wait a week before asking for Vitamin V. She really feels much better when she's eating on her own, rather than being force-fed.