Caring for Ice
By Louis-Dominique. Filed in General |
A few ramblings about caring for Ice, our oldest cat, who suffers from Feline Chronic Renal Failure.
Our oldest cat, Ice, has been blind for about five years now and has had noticeable hearing loss in one ear for more than a year. Since shortly after the start of 2005, he has been showing signs of Feline Chronic Renal Failure (CRF). His kidneys are no longer working properly which is causing a set of symptoms that my wife and I have to treat. He now takes Lactulose, rhubarb pills and Cisapride three times a day to treat constipation caused by a lack of… er… motility in the digestive tract, a problem aggravated by the CRF. He takes an antacid twice a day. Cats with CRF tend to develop acidic stomachs which leads to appetite loss. He gets sub-cutaneous fluids daily now (it used to be once every two days). The two following pictures show the bag of fluids and me giving fluids to Ice.
These days he also needs to get antibiotic injections to treat an infection. He also takes one atenolol pill every day to treat a heart condition. And then there are medications he takes temporarily (like the antibiotics) to treat secondary conditions. He has become quite finicky regarding the food he wants to eat and sometimes has to be fed by hand. I wouldn’t call that force-feeding since the procedure consists of squirting a little food in his mouth and let him swallow it. Most of the time after a few squirts, he starts eating by himself. Here’s Ice eating baby food by himself after my wife squirted some in his mouth.
We don’t typically bathe our cats unless they really need it. Unfortunately, Ice needed a bath recently so my wife took care of that:
CRF in elderly cats is a terminal condition so at some point Debbie and I will have to decide that the time has come for euthanasia. The likelihood that Ice would just die peacefully in his sleep is apparently pretty slim and letting him die of CRF would maximize his suffering so euthanasia is most likely inevitable. Our goal is to extend his time with us as long as his quality of life remains reasonable. Defining “reasonable” is key. There is no ready-made answer to this. For sure, some people will turn to this book or that book for ready-made answers or delegate the decision to some authority who will decide for them but we reject those approaches.
That’s all I can write for now… maybe I’ll post more later… especially about the difficult decision process.
PS: Ice is of the Oriental Shorthair breed.