Complete Care for Your Aging Cat - Amy Shojai [87]
The same day she noticed the change, she took him for a checkup. “He’d already lost three pounds.” Further tests, including a biopsy, determined Casey had a life-threatening form of cancer—intestinal lymphoma. Bonnie was told it was extremely aggressive, didn’t respond well to chemotherapy, and that most cats succumbed to the disease within six months. Casey was referred to an internal medicine specialist who treated him for a few months. “But he didn’t really respond to any of the original chemo that normal cats start out on,” says Bonnie. Experimental drugs were ordered, which cost $1,600 for the treatment, and they kept the cancer under control for a few months.
“By that point he’d lost almost 10 pounds—he weighed almost 20 before this started,” says Bonnie. “They talked to me about putting him to sleep.” Casey was essentially starving to death. Despite eating both normally by mouth and being fed with a tube placed into his stomach, his body wasn’t using the nutrition. “I was feeding a/d, dumping Nutrical [a vitamin supplement] in him, I tried herbal stuff and he got acupuncture, too.” Eventually the internist said he had nothing more to offer.
Bonnie wasn’t ready to give up as long as Casey seemed determined to hang on. She took the cat for another opinion. Veterinary oncologist Lisa Fulton in Gaithersberg, Maryland, explained that at this point in the disease Casey was unlikely to respond to other chemotherapy, but that they could certainly try. Bonnie felt they had nothing to lose.
They began rotating various types of chemo drugs once every three or four weeks—sometimes intravenous, other times oral or subcutaneous—in much stronger doses than what he’d received before. “He almost immediately started responding,” says Bonnie. Within six months, Casey’s cancer was under control.
Casey received chemo for two years and seven months with Dr. Fulton. “I was really impressed by the lack of sickness at all,” says Bonnie. Casey vomited a couple of times, and one day after chemo his whiskers fell out. That was all.
Because of the aggressive nature of Casey’s cancer, they planned to keep the cat on a maintenance dose indefinitely. Then his red blood cell count dropped a bit, and so Casey is taking a break from the medicine to give his body a rest.
Since Casey has been off chemo, he’s gained weight and is back up to over 14 pounds. Bonnie can’t say enough good things about Dr. Fulton. They both agree Casey is a miracle.
He celebrated his thirteenth birthday this past July. “He’s doing great, he bounces off the walls,” says Bonnie. That just goes to show what determination can accomplish.
CATARACTS
Cataracts in cats most frequently develop as a result of other diseases such as feline immunodeficiency or feline leukemia that prompt eye inflammation. Cataracts may develop at any age, or later in life. But unlike dogs, cataracts are not considered a common “old cat” problem.
The inflammation causes the clear lens of the eye to turn cloudy and opaque. A cataract may affect only a small part of the lens, and the cat can compensate and see “around” the problem. In other cases the entire lens turns white, and the cat loses vision until eventually she becomes blind. The longer these cataracts “mature,” the more difficult it becomes to treat them successfully.
Cataracts may be diagnosed by general practice veterinarians, but veterinary ophthalmologists need to treat the condition. “Surgery is the only way to treat cataracts,” says Harriet Davidson, DVM, an ophthalmologist at Michigan Veterinary Specialists.
“Cataract surgery in the cats is much more infrequent than in dogs but almost always has a good success rate,” says Paul A. Gerding, Jr., DVM, an ophthalmologist at University of Illinois. “They just have much less inflammation following the surgery than the dog, and the surgery turns out very well.”
Senior Symptoms
Signs of cataracts develop slowly and may not be obvious until