Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

One of our cats has been having some frustrating health problems in the last year or so. DISCLAIMER: this is a story with an insanely icky middle but a happy ending. By “insanely icky,” I mean that you should not read this while eating or if you have a weak stomach.

Isis is now about 9 years old and has been with us since she was between 6 and 12 months old. She was a gaunt and dirty stray when we took her off the mean apartment complex streets. We soon discovered that she had worms… and was pregnant. But we took good care of her, eventually found good homes for her 5 kittens, and she became our little darling.

Our lives were content as a two-cat family. Isis is a tiny cat who at her fattest weighed 7.5 pounds—a contrast to Loki’s bumbling 20-pound average. Except for an occasional can of cat food or licking leftover milk out of a cereal bowl, both cats have eaten standard dry cat food their whole lives. We tried some “light” food for Loki at one point, but that didn’t seem to do much good for his weight (or mood) and we always ended up back at budget-friendly Purina Cat Chow in the blue bag.

When Phoebe joined the family in the summer 2007, Isis made it known that she was not happy with our little addition. She started shedding more and eating less. We figured she needed more time to adjust. In November that year, we discovered a lump on her belly. I flipped my shit a little worrying that it was cancer, but it turned out to just be a hernia. We opted for surgery, which went fine, and the scar healed nicely.

But she basically stopped eating.

She started hanging around the kitchen—crying every time we opened the fridge and gladly eating a scrap of chicken or licking out a bowl of human food—so we knew she was hungry. She went back to the vet in January 2008 for her annual shots, and he told us that older cats will sometimes start to become picky eaters for no apparent reason.

We tried some different dry food brands and types—sensitive stomach, senior cat, indoor formula, etc.—and she turned her nose up at it all. Though we were reluctant to give her canned food, mostly because of its much higher price point, we eventually gave in because she was just so skinny. Even worse than the gaunt state she had been in as a pregnant stray with worms.

She wolfed down any canned food we gave her. “Great!” we thought, until she started puking it up. This is where the story gets gross. I’ve never smelled anything more disgusting than freshly-horked canned cat food puke. My nose and mouth are twitching just thinking about it. And sometimes, the barf was more than just a pile of half-digested muck; it was a projectile vomit spray that almost impressed us more than it gave us a gag reflex. And what she managed to keep down had an odor that made the paint peel when it came out into the litter box.

It was at this point that we purchased a Hoover steam cleaner. It is probably one of the best household decisions we’ve ever made.

We tried feeding her in smaller increments with the logic that she was eating too fast. That just made her barf smaller amounts and cry more often from hunger. We took her to the vet, who did a blood panel and stool screening and found nothing wrong, and whose only suggestion was to try different types of food. In the summer of 2008, shortly after being laid off from my job, I thought she was going to die of starvation or whatever undetectable disease she had. I spent a lot of time cuddling with her, listening to the horrifyingly loud gurgles that came from her bowels, and wishing that there was a way for me to make it all better.

Maybe it was the full-time attention I was giving her that made me notice something about her reaction to food. We were buying 24-packs of Friskies canned food, which came in four flavors: Salmon, Ocean Whitefish, Chicken, and Mixed Grill. One day I suddenly realized that she was puking her food up within a half hour when she ate the salmon flavor, but keeping the other flavors down.

We banned salmon from her diet, and suddenly we were cleaning up less puke. A couple weeks later, I experimented with banning all fish products from her diet. She still had some major gurgling sounds in her belly, but she nearly stopped vomiting all together; it was like a Get Out of Hurl-Jail Free card.

Except we also needed a Get Out of Diarrhea-Jail Free Card.

Okay, everyone knows that poop stinks. Ingesting different foods creates varying levels of smell and consistency in mammals’ excrement. But Ben and I were still dealing with some major “EVERYONE OUT OF THE ROOM, NOW!” situations after Isis visited the litter box and dropped a pile of mud (thankfully she always used the litter box!).

Now imagine that you’ve lived in a pleasantly lavender-filled area your whole life, and then someone suddenly hits you over the head and shoves you into a wormhole that dumps you into an open cesspit swamp, and the fumes are entering your pores and making you cry and you can’t scream because if you do you’ll simply become a part of the toxic slurry.

That’s essentially what happened to us every day, sometimes twice a day, after Isis came bolting out of the pet door into the family room from the Fumigation Area.

But you know what? Constant diarrhea was still better than having to clean up puke and that crap every day. (And I should let everyone know that Ben cleaned the litter box 99% of the time because he is my HERO.) (Also, our friend Laura cleaned the litter box while we were out of town a couple times, and I don’t know what you’ve done for your friends lately but she never complained once and is basically the most selfless person ever.)

I finally took Isis to a different vet a few weeks ago for a second opinion. He did a really thorough exam, and discovered that she has an unknown lump in her belly or a pendular kidney. Probably a pendular kidney, since she looks (somehow! still!) healthy otherwise. I started to feel like he thought I was just an over-reactive cat owner (“my cat’s shit stinks! make it stop!”) until, in a very out-of-character move, Isis took a steaming dump in her carrier as soon as she was put back in. The vet was able to get a fresh stool sample… and I nearly vomited right there in that little exam room as he scooped it into the vial.

The vet cleaned out the carrier for me and thus greatly endeared himself to me. He talked about the possible tests that could be done to find out what’s wrong with Isis, and the probability of finding nothing. He brought up Irritable Bowel Syndrome, something I’d heard of in humans but never in animals.

“It basically means we don’t know what the heck is wrong,” the vet said.

I told him about the fish sensitivity I thought Isis had, and the he suggested that I try feeding her some Science Diet prescription-only hypoallergenic cat food and see if that worked for her.

I came home with the seed of “Hey, it could be food allergies!” in my head. Isis wouldn’t touch the $2.19/can prescription food at first, but on the second day she ate it when mixed with some Friskies, and then the third day she ate it by itself. I looked at the label to see what made the food “hypoallergenic” and was surprised to see corn and soy in the top three ingredients. Soy? WTF? That’s a documented allergen in some human mammals I know.

We didn’t notice a change in Isis’s poop with the “hypoallergenic” food, but by then I had done some internet research on feline-specific irritable bowel syndrome and found two great resources: The Basics of Feline Nutrition by veterinarian Lisa A. Pierson and CatNutrition.org. If you own a cat—even one without Feline IBS—I highly recommend that you visit those two websites.

In summary, cats are obligate carnivores. This means that in the wild a cat’s diet consists nearly entirely of meat, and it is really not surprising that cats can develop problems with digestion and even skin allergies from all the crap that’s in commercial pet foods, like grains and other unnecessary carbohydrates. Dogs can still develop sensitivities to grains, but their systems are much more capable of handling them (and other non-foods like aluminum foil and other dogs’ poop).

I took some suggestions from those two websites and bought a whole chicken (about 5 pounds for $5), which I cooked and ground up with the bones in all. I used the meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid stand mixer for the first time since receiving it as a wedding gift in 2004. It worked wonderfully!

We fed that double-ground chicken carcass to Isis for two days. And the diarrhea stopped.

GONE.

No more gurgling sounds in her belly and no puking. Isis slept for most of those first two days, probably getting the first restful sleep she’s had in over a year. She’s already gained half a pound and is now inching closer to a healthy 6 pound weight. Her fur seems thicker and she seems happy.

So today, on Valentine’s Day, Ben and I expressed our love for Isis by spending an hour or so cooking some more chicken, then grinding it all up and portioning it into containers to freeze. She has enough food for a couple weeks now. I’m not quite ready to give her raw meat, so I hope that whatever enzymes she loses from the cooking won’t affect her too seriously. I mean, putting things into perspective, she’s a lot better off than she was just a couple weeks ago.

And so are we.

I’m taking Isis back to the vet next week to double check that lump in her belly and have blood drawn to rule out thyroid problems, just in case. I’m taking with me the Open Letter to Veterinary Professionals, written by Anne of CatNutrition.org, with hopes that my vet will not recommend carbohydrate-filled pet food to other pet owners who are experiencing the same heartbreaking and vomit-inducing troubles that we’ve been through.

Obligate carnivore. It’s part of my vocabulary now.