An update on Sadie's health

Hello All

I thought I’d give you a bit of an update on Miss Sadie, who has been doing spectacularly poorly lately. She’s been staying at the vet since Tuesday, where they admitted her to try and identify the cause of her jaundice, weight loss and weakness. Since then we’ve been through a host of diagnoses, conflicting and complementary. At this point they’re treating her for a blood parasite (which doesn’t show up on any of her panels, but a tech thinks he saw on the blood slide), and she has a feeding tube to deal with her Fatty Liver Disease, which is the big danger.

Fatty Liver basically means a happy, round cat got unhappy and stopped eating. Sadie didn’t take well to my mother’s house or the week with a cat-sitter. She may also have been feeling lousy because of this parasite. Whatever the reason, she stopped eating, and her liver clogged up from processing her body fat into food. Lack of appetite is a vicious cycle in cats, and it’s pretty impossible to get her to eat at this point. The only treatment for Fatty Liver is to get the metabolism back up, to nourish Sadie and flush out her liver, hence the feeding tube.

I’m going home to collect her tonight, and moving her to a sunny new apartment in Hell’s Kitchen tomorrow, where the feeding regimen will begin. The vet is recommending a 4-times-a-day feeding schedule, meaning ever six hours Sadie and I have to wrestle some mush and meds down her tube. Eventually this comes down to 3-a-day, and in the long term she (hopefully) starts eating again on her own. Her prognosis isn’t good, even with this near-constant care, so I’m banking on her being young and more resilient than the doctors give her credit for.

It’s been a rough week around these parts, but nothing compared to what the kitten’s been going through. Keep her in your thoughts if you can, and if anybody around New York is interested in visiting (or helping me with lunchtime feedings, I have no idea how this is going to work with my full-time job) drop a line. We’d both appreciate it, certainly.