Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [40]
When Tara joined the family, her teeth were already so bad that even with regular dental care, they continued to decay. “We had to have them all taken out, so Tara can’t eat hard food.” Tara now drools all the time, probably due to all her missing teeth. “She’ll get drool all over my keyboard, and she’ll shake her head and it’ll go all over the monitor.” Dealing with four cats, it was easiest to offer all of them the same food rather than argue about who got what. “When Tara got soft food, everybody wanted soft food,” says Yasmine. “There was going to be a riot if that didn’t happen.”
Living with four aging cats is all about making compromises, says Yasmine. It’s also about staying alert to changes. “I thought that Tara had developed a tumor. I felt this lump on her side, and thought oh my god she’s going to die on me!” After checking with the vet, the lump turned out to be Tara’s normal kidney. “I never felt so stupid,” says Yasmine—but she was even more relieved and grateful. A false alarm is much preferred to the alternative.
Eleven-year-old Pakhit, a longhaired brown classic tabby, still rules the house with an iron paw. Age has just made her personality even more distinctive. “She’s very overbearing, and getting grumpier. She’s just easier to aggravate and irritate,” says Yasmine. “She’s more impatient the older she gets, in terms of I want it now, or move over, I want my food now, I want to sit on you,” she says.
Despite her maturity, Pakhit also sometimes forgets she’s not a kitten any more. “She’ll run laps, then try to jump and can’t quite hold with her claws, and she’ll slide down the wall,” says Yasmine. Part of that has to do with her weight. “She’s a butterball. With her long hair she looks like this big tribble on legs,” says Yasmine. She predicts that ramps and booster stairs—and maybe a diet—are in Pakhit’s future.
Today, all four of Yasmine’s cats are in relatively good health, and she does her best to keep them happy and healthy by observing for changes, getting prompt vet care, and providing environmental accommodations when necessary. “It helps to listen to your cats,” she says. “My cats are my kids,” she says. That makes listening with your heart only natural. “If you are tuned in to your pets, you can tell what they need.”
CHAPTER 4—NURSING CARE
The most important part of your cat’s world is you, and as long as you remain a constant in his life, he can live with illness and infirmity and still be happy. Cats aren’t concerned about having all their diseased teeth removed or losing their sight to glaucoma—they’re just glad the pain went away.
Old cats don’t have much time to waste feeling bad—every minute, every day counts when your feline friend is sixteen. “You hate for them to spend the time they have left in the hospital,” says Nicole Ehrhart, VMD, a cancer specialist and surgeon at the University of Illinois (now at Colorado State University). “Pets wake up every day and say, this is how I feel today. If we’re making their treatment worse than their disease, even for long-term gain, the pet doesn’t understand that.”
Based on these considerations, owners can choose 1) curative intent therapy—in which you hit the problem with treatment as hard as humanly possible; 2) palliative care; or 3) hospice. For instance, curative intent therapy includes a kidney transplant that replaces the failing organ; radioactive iodine treatment for hyperthyroid disease, which selectively destroys the abnormal tissue causing the problem; and therapies designed to remove, destroy, and stop tumor growth and cure the cancer.
“With the palliative realm you accept that [the condition] will progress, that quality of life is now reasonable, and so we’ll prevent symptoms as long as we possibly can,” says Dr. Ehrhart. That might be the best possible choice for an aged feline at high risk for a radical surgery, for example, or for an animal whose cancer is too advanced for other options. It might also be an economical or ethical choice for owners who aren’t interested