More GI Woes

Shortly after our last vet visit with Orion, Prometheus began having really bad poop.  It began mushy and slowly progressed to liquid and mucus throughout the week.  By mid last week, Prometheus started vomiting each time after he ate.  It began Thursday morning and got worse by the afternoon.  Like, it smelled like something crawled up Prometheus’ butt and died.  I made an appointment at the vet for the following morning and kept a close eye on Prometheus.

Like any pet parent, I worried.  A lot.  I racked my mind with different possibilities.  The symptoms looked a lot like Castiel’s earlier in June, when it was discovered he had a food allergy.  However, the food that we were feeding Prometheus hadn’t changed and he never had a reaction to it before.  I thought it was highly unlikely he had a food allergy and something more serious was going on.

What pushed my worry over the edge into uncontrollable anxiety was by 3pm Prometheus red flakes of blood in his vomit and a little blood in his diarrhea.  Every time I see any cat have that, my mind automatically thinks back to Morpheus when he showed those symptoms and it turned out to be stomach/intestinal cancer.  So, monsters in my head screamed tumor or obstruction.  Needless to say, I couldn’t focus on anything but Prometheus.  I lifted his food for a few hours to give his GI tract a rest.  When Pro Pro and the other kitties demanded their food by 6pm, I watched Prometheus carefully.  He didn’t vomit after his last feeding for the evening.  While I took this as a good sign, I was still worried about our special cookie.

Friday morning, Prometheus took a trip to Edgewater to visit his friends at Animal General.  Everyone loves him there.  After a thorough examination, Dr. O thought it was an inflammation of his colon and small intestines.  She couldn’t feel any constipation or foreign bodies or tumors, which put my mind slightly at ease.  She gave us the option of taking an x-ray to be overly cautious.  With Ron leaving with family for the weekend, we didn’t want to take any chances that maybe there was something hiding in his intestines.  So, we had a few x-rays taken.  Dr. O confirmed that the x-rays were negative for foreign bodies, tumors, and anything else out of the ordinary.  Such a sign of relief.

She suggested putting Prometheus on a bland diet for a few days and prescribed him flagyl.  This way, his GI tract could have a few days of resting on the bland diet while the flagyl worked its magic.

Less than a week later, Prometheus has some poop that has shape.  A lot of it is still mushy, but it’s solidifying slowly.  If he doesn’t have completely solid waste by next week, I’ll bring in another fecal sample to check for parasites.  When we first adopted him, he had a difficult time getting rid of a nasty case of giardia.  Best to check just to make sure.

Because Prometheus has CH, I have to wait for him to use the litter box and clean his paws after he’s done.  Sometimes he has a hard time maintaining balance when he’s going and gets a little on his legs.  But that’s just one of the challenges I signed up for when adopting a CH cat.  No complaints here!  Just want his GI tract to function properly!