Vet said he needed shots to boost his nerves and if he doesn’t respond well in a couple days he’ll do an X-ray and decide on a further course of treatment. He’s back to purring in my lap again. Hug your kitties extra tight for me tonight.
I had a cat that was maybe 6 or 7 years old when she suddenly started having seizures. After a seizure, she’d be wobbly for a few days, then eventually back to normal… until it happened again. Vet couldn’t figure out what was going on. We decided to try to track when she had the seizures—was it when she ate something out of the ordinary, got exposed to something unusual, on a recurring schedule? That sort of thing. We quickly found out that within a day or two of giving her a dose of Frontline flea treatment (the kind you drip on the back of their neck) she’d have a seizure. We stopped giving her Frontline and she never had another seizure.
Frontline is actual garbage flea medicine anyways. Shit never worked when I or my grandmother used it. I got some good flea meds from my vet that 1: actually worked 2: applied much less liquid to the cat.
Cats don’t have the metabolic pathways that dogs and humans have that process and neutralize many common insecticides belonging to a class called pyrethroids. For cat flea control meds, these are substituted with fipronil, which is (less) toxic and doesn’t get absorbed through the skin, though when we were dealing with a flea infestation a few years back we still had problems when one of our cats ended up being flexible enough to scrape the gel off its neck and lick it off its paw. Bottom line, though, cats tend to have a lot more trouble with metabolizing medications generally, and tend to encounter problems with “cat safe” meds more often than you’d expect. You have to be careful about monitoring your cat after starting a medication generally.
The feels on this are real, I dealt with this similar issue years back. Lots of love and advice for you already, but 1 thing is missing you need to hear:
This is not your fault. There are very few signs that would be seen by us that would indicate anything is wrong. Cats (and other pets) have instincts to hide the pain from predators until they are healed. No matter how much you love them, pain is weakness that is exploited in the animal world, even by trusted animals.
I hope he heals up, and I’ll be giving my cat a little extra love today.
Yeah and it can be so subtle. I noticed some slightly weird behavior in the litter box by one of our cats - he seemed to be straining and going from one box to the other. We got him checked and sure enough he had an infection. It would have been really easy to miss, or write off, but this is definitely not our first cat, and subtle signs are often all you get until things really blow up.
We almost lost a cat a few years ago because we didn’t react quickly. She was behaving strangely hiding under the bed, and I kept saying, we need to get her to the vet, but I think my wife thought it would settle down. Then we got home from a hockey game one night, and she could barely walk. We took her to the emergency vet, fortunately just in time, but it was really close. (That cat had multiple health issues and passed away a few years later, when she was 7. I still miss her.)
Oh boy. You’d think I’d remember after $2,000 in hospital bills, but …it turns out that was the cheapest of her visits to that hospital, unfortunately. As I recall, they were never able to diagnose it for certain, but they were pretty sure it was some sort of infection in the blood, probably from a tick.
Our cats are all indoor only, so we had no idea where she would have found a tick. We had just moved to a new house a month or so before that happened, and the previous owners had a dog, so our theory is that there was one in the house that got her. We were going on a trip with the cats a few weeks after that, so, before we left, we bug-bombed the entire house, in the hopes it would take care of any other ticks that might be present.
Then, a few weeks after the hospital visit, we noticed when we were going to bed that she seemed to be focused on her own tail, which was unusual. We tried to distract her and it seemed okay, but when we woke up in the morning, there was blood all over the house - she’d attacked her own tail and got it bleeding, then walked all over the house. My wife took her to the emergency vet again while I cleaned up the mess…it was in our bedroom, my office, the hallway and steps, and all over the first floor. They tried to bandage it, but it wasn’t healing, so eventually they had to dock her tail a few inches. Apparently this is something that can happen to cats after a trauma like the first infection, no real cause other than that.
We now put that monthly flea and tick on our dog (who we adopted well after the incidents above) and two of the three cats; the third one is way too skittish to allow that…but he’s never going near a door that’s open anyway.
Feline hyperesthesia is probably what you’re referring to with her tail self-mutilation. Definitely odd there would be a random residual infectious tick in a new house lol, but stranger things have happened! Weird !
That does sound familiar! Yeah, I can’t really explain the tick thing, especially since it happened a few weeks after we moved in - if it had been a day or two, you’d think that would make more sense. More likely, it was caused by something else and the tick thing is just the most common way it happens.
Hey buddy, I don’t want to alarm you, I had a friend lose their cat very suddenly to a saddle thrombosis - which is a blood clot that can block blood flow to the rear legs and become catastrophic. It can happen suddenly and can cause loss of control of bowels, difficulty in rear legs, panting, expressions of pain from cat - ie meowing or howling. Did your vet mention/ rule this out when you saw them?
There’s a link below which explains it fairly well in layman terms. I hope it’s unlikely, it is very serious and early intervention is important and gives the best chance to your little guy. I’d feel bad having seen what my friend went through and not sharing the possibility with you.
We lost our first good boy to this. One moment he was happy sprawled out on the floor, next howling in agony and dragging himself by his forelegs. Nothing the vet could do, described it as basically a major stroke for a cat. Just one of those freak things.
Right. I asked the vet and he said that based on what he’s seeing, this wasn’t it. As for how he’s doing, he was doing better after the first shot he got. He started getting more mobile, walking faster, being able to jump a little bit and such. He got the second shot today. We’ll continue to monitor his progress.
He started walking weird, really slow compared to normal. His tail was all weird. It doesn’t go straight up or go into the question mark shape when he sees me anymore, it was at a low angle. When he stretches, it’s in this weird parabola shape. He didn’t come out of his normal spot to cuddle with me when I wake up, and he didn’t come out for food either. When I pick him up and bring him to the food bowl he’ll lap it up like normal. If i pick him up and put him in my lap he would cuddle like normal as well. He showed zero signs of fear or aggression. So I thought something was seriously seriously wrong. I brought him to the vet the next day.
One of my cats started having seizures, brought him to the vet, and got him on medication - seizure free for over a year now. I guess what I’m trying to say is follow the vets advice and hope for the best. They know what they’re doing. Here’s hoping your kitty will recover with the proper care and love.
Thank you ❤️. Honestly, it was really really weird. He was his usual playful self, running and jumping all over the place. And then suddenly out of nowhere he screeched really loud from the other room. When I checked up on him he was just on the ground meowing out. And then he started walking weird, didn’t come out for food (had to pick him up and bring him to the bowl), his tail got all weird so I brought him to the vet. It was literally like a switch flipped. Looking back now, I’m feeling really guilty. Maybe there were warning signs and I missed them, idk.
This happened to my old man cat when he fell off the couch. I was beside myself with grief because I thought it was the end. He recovered and kept on going after that though.
I agree with the other person, it doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong. It’s incredibly difficult to gauge what’s worthy of going to the doctor about for your own ass, let alone for a little fluff ball who cannot tell you what’s happening to them. You did alright OP, don’t you dare think otherwise. Take care of your boy, and you.
No, no, no. Cats are really really good at hiding when there’s something wrong, even if they completely trust you. My kitty started walking stiffly and wasn’t playing as much. I made an appointment, because I thought it was arthritis or something as she was getting old, and that’s something the vet helped me to understand.
Hope you can do treatment that will work for him and that you have many more happy years with him! You both clearly deserve each other!
Hi there. I don’t want to alarm you at all, but something very similar happened to my baby. She’s still with me, but she had sudden partial paralysis and she was in the emergency vet for three days.
She was running and then suddenly her back end wasn’t moving properly or at all and she was howling. I rushed her in and they kept her, after those first few days they decided it was a blood clot in her spine by the base of her tail.
It was a long road and we’re still on that road two years later, but it was touch and go. I would mention a spinal blood clot to your vet to get their take/see what they can find out as these seem like the most similar cases I’ve come across—or at least you’re the first person I’ve heard that has a simile story.
Thankfully your little one doesn’t seem to have it as bad, because Liz Lemon was, I’m pretty sure, 50% paralyzed immediately.
Please take care of your buddy, as I’m sure you are of course. It was a very scary situation and has definitely changed her life (and mine, as we are dealing with partial incontinence), but she’s managed to continue to live a happy special kitty life. The burden is now mostly on me, which I’m happy to take on so she can thrive.
Let me know if you have any questions and best of luck to both of you!!
Edit: just as reassurance, mine was an emergency-vet-right-the-fuck-now situation, which thankfully yours does not sound like it’s to that degree. Her tail and back legs were affected, both inert, back legs more stiff while her tail drooped. Again, you seem to have a better situation on your hands, relatively, but the symptoms sound similar enough to mention to your vet. I hope this can help at least give you all one more possible cause to look at. Best to you all, I’m sure your boy will come through this just fine!
Best of luck! And again, your situation sounds similar enough for my situation to offer you some insight, but it really does seem like your boy isn’t in as bad of a situation as my girl was. So I really hope my news doesn’t devastate you or anything. It just took my vet a long time to narrow down what was happening, so if something to look for could serve as a helping hand, I’d be glad something good came out of it.
That’s amazing! It sounds like maybe our babies’ situations were similar but just on very different scales and his resolved itself more harmlessly. Hopefully it’s just something to keep an eye on. I’m so glad to hear he’s doing well today. Here’s to him continuing down this healthful road!
It sounds like you caught it pretty early. Earlier than where it would be at for many pet parents.
Just give him love and encouragement, and do what you can to help him out. Try and reassure him the best you can through this uncertainty. Im sure hes just as confused about whats happening to him as you are. Sometimes things just happen. All you can do is to be the best friend to him that you can be and hopefully treatment will help.
You did good and you’re giving it all you got. That’s what counts.
Also, depending on the diagnosis, treatment needs, where your located, and your amount of resources, there maybe places with state of the art facilities that can help. Here we have Texas A&M. They can handle things like rare disease, chemo, dialysis, and complicated surgeries. If it looks like the appropriate thing to do, it maybe worth asking your vet if there’s someplace like that around you.
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