#feline ibd

I talked to the vet, and he prescribed a slightly higher dosage; we'll experiment until we find the dose that works for him, which he'll need for life. Ah well. There are worse problems to have, for him and for me.

as my Twitter followers might know, Rogue, my older cat, has been very sick for several months. after countless diet changes, blood tests, ultrasounds, two different antibiotic courses etc., she was finally diagnosed with IBD.

a standard steroid treatment did not help and I was losing the rest of my hope... but the doctor suggested an immunosuppressant used in treating feline lymphomas and severe cases of IBD.

I was very scared because it’s essentially chemotherapy, and it can do really nasty things to her body, including organ damage and bone marrow suppression, but...

it works!

the IBD is basically in almost full remission now, so please keep fingers crossed that it stays that way and that we can get her off the immunosuppressants soon.

I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for the last half a year and I can finally let it out.

She gets a treat food like Applaws with probiotics in the morning to get her going, then complete dry food for lunch, complete wet food for tea, and a Lick-e-Lix with her steroid in. (The Lick-e-Lix isn't ideal but we need a method of getting pills down her that doesn't involve my nervous and inexperienced partner wrestling the pointy end when I'm away for two weeks.) She's currently on the maximum daily dose of Prednisone and it really seems to be helping. I'd like to get her onto a lower maintenance dose ideally but that's a future problem. I mean we now have an immunocompromised cat, but we have a living and eating cat. Who lives indoors and never meets any other cats to get diseases from.

Current working assumption is kitty IBD/chronic enteropathy. Lymphoma remains a possibility but the vet couldn't feel any masses; she's almost impossible to examine (gabapentin makes her wobbly, but no less violently angry, so I put on a lot of layers and give her a bear hug while the vet works as fast as possible and she chews my glove); it doesn't always show on ultrasound/biopsy; and treatment would be the same anyway (steroids + try to find food she can actually digest).

Now we just need to get some weight on her. I'll be a happy woman if she's put on a couple hundred grams before her next check-up, but long-term goal is to regain a kilo.

04.11.2022

The vet called us today and told us that the results of Freckols’ biopsy surgery are out. They haven’t found any traces of cancer cells, which means he has IBD. Although IBD is incurable, we can manage it with food and try to keep the flareups at bay. I was so relieved. 

Gave Faf his second dose of Leukeran (it's once every four days) on Saturday evening. He spent most of Sunday sprawled out sleeping on one of our laps. It really knocks the poor guy out. He was so tired he kept falling asleep, and dream-twitching, with his eyes half open. I haven't seen him literally "nod off" since he was a kitten. He also sneezes a lot. At least I think it's sneezing. I don't know what a kitty cough sounds like, but it resembles a light sneeze more than anything else, except that he'll have like 6 of them in a row.

He seems to be enjoying his morning wet food. He licks the liquid off, then tries to bury it. The. He leaves and comes back a minute later and licks/buries some more. Then after a third round he's finished off a decent portion.

He had bad gas and super smelly poo yesterday. I don't think he has diarrhea but his stool is very soft. BF says that might be a side effect of the meds.

Feline inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic condition similar to Crohn's disease or celiac in humans. It has no known cause and no known cure. I started this blog to help document Fafnir's condition, as we have to carefully manage it for the rest of his life.

We suspected IBD, but were hoping it was a temporary food allergy, or maybe just irritable bowel syndrome. After a year of ups and downs and experimenting with Fafnir's diet, we scheduled an ultrasound. The ultrasound showed thickening of the bowels as well as damage to the ileum and a buildup of fluid near the spleen and liver.

The vet suspects either feline eosinophilic inflammatory bowel disease or lymphoma (cancer). The only way to tell for certain which one it is would be to do exploratory surgery and take a variety of biopsies. Because the treatment for both conditions is nearly identical, we have decided to forgo the invasive procedures and simply treat him instead.

He is currently on prednisolone (an anti inflammatory corticosteroid) twice a day and leukeran (a cat chemo drug that also has anti inflammatory properties) every four days. Since his ileum has taken the worst damage, we're also giving him vitamin B12 injections (cobalamin) twice a week. We also have appetite stimulant tablets to use as needed, but for now he appears to be somewhat interested in food and water, even if he's not consuming very many calories.

Every three weeks we'll need to bring him in for a complete blood count (CBC) to keep an eye on his white cell levels.

His vomiting stopped when we took fish (ironically, his favorite food) out of his diet. We're being very careful to keep him away from people food (he's sneaky about breaking into the butter), houseplants (he likes eating dead leaves), and have also moved his food/litter stations around to keep his food and water from getting contaminated with litter (he can kick litter clear across the room if he wants to). 

We also have a baby scale that's accurate up to 0.5 ounces arriving in the mail today. We've been keeping an eye on his weight via our home scale (weigh yourself with the cat; weigh yourself without the cat; calculate the difference) for the past nine months, but a) it's supposedly only accurate to 0.2 pounds; and b) it doesn't seem very consistent. It's fine for monitoring human weight loss or weight gain but it's not sensitive enough to monitor the kitties.