CATS
Every blog entry is written in both English and Japanese. If you only see Japanese, please scroll down the page for English.
Introducing Our Feline Family!
Meet Shadow & Tiger
Shadow (left) is a male domestic black tabby and Tiger (right) is a female domestic orange-black tabby. Both are brother and sister. We got them from a local shelter about seven years ago. Since then, Shadow went through major surgeries twice. He has developed pancreatitis, and we almost lost him. I would like to share some stories about him and his recovery, and also about Tiger and her issues with allergies. Both are on a raw diet (though I add some canned food), which seems to help their health issues. I will share the recipe for raw food in future posts.
Love at First Sight
They were only 4 weeks old...
Battling Feline Hepatic Lipidosis and Chronic Pancreatitis
Shadow suffers from chronic pancreatitis. No, he wasn’t born with it. He developed it because he ate a piece of rubber tube TWICE!
First Foreign Object
The first time was when he was about one year old. One day, he started vomiting his guts out, couldn’t stop, couldn’t eat or drink. Our vet told us to keep an eye on until the next day. She didn’t want to give him any antiemetic just in case he had some sort of poisoning or foreign body that his body needed to get rid of. With no improvement, we took him to the vet, and they did ultrasound under surveillance to see if there was any distraction in fluid flow. Still, no findings and no improvements. She had a hunch that he might have a foreign body, so she asked us if we would be willing to let him go under a knife. Since there was no other way to find out, we agreed. And she did indeed find a piece of thick rubber tube (one of those exercise bands), which was about a 1/2 inch long stuck in where stomach became small intestine. Thankfully he made swift recovery afterward since we dealt with the problem promptly. We are forever thankful to the wonderful young veterinarian who didn’t hesitate to follow her suspicion.
Second Foreign Object
Two years later, one morning, Shadow started vomiting again. We were very puzzled because we had been super careful about rubber and rubber tubes since the last incident, so we never imagined he had the same problem! Unfortunately, in these two years, the animal health care system in Victoria has dramatically changed. We could no longer take our babies to our vet as an emergency. Any urgent case must be dealt with the central animal hospital that is designated as an emergency hospital. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone at the central vet hospital is super nice. It was just that it took a whole a lot longer to go through the process of diagnosing. We had to leave Shadow in their care for observation for two days without any improvement and ended up coming home because he just couldn’t eat or sleep there with all other sick animals in the same area. By the time he came home, he had lost so much weight, and three days had already passed without him eating. We talked with our vet, and she was kind enough to reschedule some of her patients so that she could take a look at him. Since he had a history of foreign body, she suspected he might have something but couldn’t be sure, and her clinic didn’t have the proper equipment such as ultrasound. (You need to be certified to use ultrasound or endoscope on animals.) Since he couldn’t eat, she put a catheter through the side of his neck down to his stomach and asked us to put liquid food to keep him alive. However, he was getting weaker and weaker by the minute. He still made no improvements. If I remember correctly, it was about a few days later, he projected out some water he just drunk. We took him to the central again, and this time they finally found an obstruction in his intestine with ultrasound. From there, everything went very quickly. Our vet took him in for surgery (she had kept close contact with the central, and they had decided that it would be best she would operate on him, considering our financial situation), and she did indeed find another piece of rubber tube. It was almost embedded into the wall of his intestine, all squished and eroded. Because of the condition of the tube, we wondered if it was from the first incident. Anyway, the surgery was a success.
This was taken when we were still trying to figure out what was going on with him. You can see a catheter sticking out on his neck, and he had a collar to protect that area. He was losing weight by the second.