Courageous update
Nov. 7th, 2003 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzillaWe've talked so much about the rats that we don't talk about the kitty much.
It was one year ago this month (I don't have a note of the exact day) that we discovered that she was having severe problems eating. Over the course of the next three months, she received various courses of antibiotic treatment for gingivitis (inflammation of the gums), which would work for a couple of weeks and then stop. Finally, one of our doctors remembered that recurrent gingivitis is a marker of active FIV, a feline disease very similar to HIV-induced AIDS. She was tested in February of this year and is, indeed, FIV+.
Since then, we've been treating her gingivitis symptomatically with steroid shots. The shots come every sixteen to twenty days. She's on an alternating schedule of interferon--small doses once a day for a week, then a week off, alternating--which seems to have some positive effect on how frequently she has to get the shots. When she demonstrates trouble eating her regular canned food, she gets "maximum calorie", which is a high-fat, high-sugar, nearly liquid food which smells strongly of peanut butter but is actually made from beets; when she can't eat that, she drinks "cat milk" (lactose reduced, taurine enhanced) for a day or two until the steroid takes effect.
As we've mentioned, she now lives outside in her own patio. She can no longer run free, because of the fear that she will injure and infect another cat or that she will get opportunistic infections from them, and also so that she doesn't wander off in pain and never come back. We're working on getting glass windows installed to weather-proof the patio so that she can live there all winter instead of being exiled back to the garage.
She's a great cat, and she's mostly happy. Which is what we ask.
It was one year ago this month (I don't have a note of the exact day) that we discovered that she was having severe problems eating. Over the course of the next three months, she received various courses of antibiotic treatment for gingivitis (inflammation of the gums), which would work for a couple of weeks and then stop. Finally, one of our doctors remembered that recurrent gingivitis is a marker of active FIV, a feline disease very similar to HIV-induced AIDS. She was tested in February of this year and is, indeed, FIV+.
Since then, we've been treating her gingivitis symptomatically with steroid shots. The shots come every sixteen to twenty days. She's on an alternating schedule of interferon--small doses once a day for a week, then a week off, alternating--which seems to have some positive effect on how frequently she has to get the shots. When she demonstrates trouble eating her regular canned food, she gets "maximum calorie", which is a high-fat, high-sugar, nearly liquid food which smells strongly of peanut butter but is actually made from beets; when she can't eat that, she drinks "cat milk" (lactose reduced, taurine enhanced) for a day or two until the steroid takes effect.
As we've mentioned, she now lives outside in her own patio. She can no longer run free, because of the fear that she will injure and infect another cat or that she will get opportunistic infections from them, and also so that she doesn't wander off in pain and never come back. We're working on getting glass windows installed to weather-proof the patio so that she can live there all winter instead of being exiled back to the garage.
She's a great cat, and she's mostly happy. Which is what we ask.
