Yesterday was my cat’s 16th birthday (yes, I do know her DOB; whoever surrendered her to the shelter passed it on) and today was the 14th anniversary of her Gotcha Day. I took her to the vet for her routine annual checkup, and the DVM wanted to do blood work on her, including thyroid, kidney, and liver panels, and I consented. The DVM called me, probably after office hours, to tell me that she has elevated blood sugar and serum creatinine, indicating possible kidney disease, although neither level was critical.
She wants me to bring her back in a month, and they’ll repeat the bloodwork and get a urine specimen. She had lost about a pound since she was last there, which wasn’t surprising because animals lose muscle mass as they reach advanced ages, and she wasn’t worried about that.
The blood work was half of her nearly $500 bill. Totally worth it.
Sometimes that’s really slow to progress, even if it is her kidneys. Give her treats and cuddles (and whatever if anything the vet. recommends); and hope that you’ll have quite a while with her yet.
(Not that I need to tell you to give her treats and cuddles, of course – )
The vet said it was unlikely that a BS in the low 200s indicated diabetes; most likely, it was elevated a bit due to the stress of being At The Vet, and that diabetic animals may have BS readings in the 300s or higher. (I do know that’s definitely true for people.) The normal range for feline serum creatinine runs up to about 2, and hers was around 2.5, again outside the normal range but not something to be terribly concerned about, not yet anyway.
(In early 2009, I took a very sick previous cat to the emergency vet, and her liver enzymes were so high, the machine could not measure them. >6000, for those of you in the know. She died naturally a few hours later, and my regular vet - RIP to him - said it sounded like she might have had cancer. She was 18 years old, and then I visited the shelter a few months later and brought this one home with me.)
I believe some degree of kidney problems is very common in cats at the age of 16.
Hopefully you have her on a suitable diet? There are foods formulated for early renal disease; may not be sold at a regular pet store since they are considered a prescription item.
I’ve had lots of senior cats with kidney disease - it’s very common. It sounds like she’s in the very early stages, thank goodness!
Try the special kidney diets, they help if your cat will eat them. I’ve found most of mine will not, and my thought is that no nutrition is worse than potentially inappropriate nutrition.
My seniors get a good dollop of canned food made into soup for breakfast, and I have water bowls everywhere. Kidney failure means they aren’t flushing all toxic waste products out of their system efficiently, and eventually it makes them feel like crap. I do everything I can to increase water intake. (Actually, all my cats get this. Much easier with a herd, and more water is generally good for all house cats).
At end stages of the disease, you can do subcu fluids. It gets a big dollop of water into them, far more than they can drink, to flush the system. I will say, though, that I’ve stopped doing it. Most cats aren’t fans, and I’m not convinced that the mild discomfort of having a water balloon under their skin is a good trade off for a few more months of life. My teenagers get to eat as much of whatever cat food they like the best, several soup meals, and treats of whatever I’m eating. I’m going for quality of life over quantity.
Good luck with your girl, and I hope the progression of the disease is very long and very slow!
My cat was diagnosed with chronic kidney failure at about that age, but she lived to age 22 and a half and was pretty healthy up until her last couple of days.
And I’m in agreement with that. – although the early to mid teenagers may or may not need different treatment than younger cats. Some of them do show signs of age that early, others not until the late teens. And as @Thudlow_Boink said, an occasional cat will go significantly into their twenties.
One of mine just went onto thyroid meds at only 11, though. But in my experience those meds will buy several more years of Cat Who Doesn’t Know That He’s Sick.
Ours eat it quite well, fingers crossed. Mind you, knowing how spooked cats are by change, we didn’t try to switch them in one fell swoop. We introduced it gradually by mixing in with their former food. So it constituted 10% of their diet in week 1, 20% in week 2 etc.
Worked for us, but your mileage may vary, of course!
If a cat is suspected to have chronic kidney disease (it affects up to 35% of geriatric cats), it is of the utmost importance to establish a diagnosis, evaluate the cat’s current state, and via appropriate therapies and monitoring to keep the disease from progressing. Median survival for a cat with Stage 2 CKD (mild renal azotemia) is over 3 years, but once it hits Stage 4 we are talking about a month and prohibitively expensive treatment.
If your cat won’t eat a prescription renal diet, try Fancy Feast or Friskies wet food. My vet says they’re good choices for cats with chronic kidney disease. I’ve had several cats over the last few years that lived into their late teens and they did well on that. My Sally is 18 and had her annual checkup yesterday; other than some muscle wasting over her hind end, the vet said she could pass for ten years old.
Thyroid problems seem to be one of the things that there is a medical remedy for. One of our older cats was diagnosed with that & lived many more years.
There is a LOT of different kidney wet foods out there. My old cat had beginning kidney trouble and I ordered a lot of different foods and tried a new every day. I had found a few he really liked when he had a stroke and had to be euthanised (honestly, just a few weeks after the diagnosis). My new cat like a kidney food pouch once in a while even if he isn’t old enough for them.
I’m sorry, sweetie. I know how much the prospect of losing her hurts your heart. All I can say is enjoy each and every day you have left with her. You’ve given her a beautiful life, and she couldn’t have asked for more love or care.
My cat has had Science Diet T/D, for tooth diet, for most of her life. I also give her a daily treat of a fish oil capsule mixed into a jar of chicken baby food, a spoonful or so a day, for hairballs.
That my vet wanted me to wait a month is a good sign to me. I’ll keep everyone updated. Thanks, everyone, for the kind words.
One of my cats was also diagnosed with kidney disease when she was 16 (and she also had diabetes that went in and out of remission a couple of times) and she lived for three great years after that – when she was diagnosed, I googled and found Tanya’s CKD site, which is an exhaustive and excellent resource I highly recommend taking a look at: https://www.felinecrf.org/
It has all the info you will need, and there’s also a message board/mailing list full of incredibly supportive fellow CKD cat owners if you have any more questions, or you want help interpreting bloodwork data (they are experts), or if you just need to talk to people who understand exactly what you’re going through. I didn’t know I would need that, but I did. support@tanyackd.groups.io | Home
We think our kitty had a pretty good quality of life throughout – she was still doing (most of) the things she loved to do and purring a lot right until the end. Treatments weren’t too intense, we fed her the best foods for kidney disease that we could find (ideally low phosphorus wet food – there is a lot of info on Tanya’s site, including tables of all the data on available foods, whether they’re renal foods or not: Tanya's Comprehensive Guide to Feline Chronic Kidney Disease - Which Foods to Feed, and Which to Avoid – this is helpful because the appetite decreases over time so it’s good to have as many options as possible), gave her subcutaneous fluids to help as the disease progressed, and during the last 6 months or so, some medications to help with her nausea and appetite.
If your cat does have diabetes, that will add another layer of treatments/healthcare (my partner and I became pretty good cat nurses ), but here’s a great message board for that, which also helped me a lot: Feline Diabetes Message Board - FDMB
We did what we could to extend her good days – and there were a lot of them! Odds are good that you’ll have plenty of time left with your cat too. Please do keep us posted!
Update: First of all, on Thanksgiving Eve, my cat started walking around the house and howling, and when I saw blood dripping from her nether regions, I called the vet. They were able to squeeze her in (I would have taken her to the emergency vet if they couldn’t have) and they gave her shots of an antibiotic and a pain reliever, and some sub-Q fluids. I swear, she was feeling better by the time we got home! They wanted me to bring her back in a week, and I cancelled the original follow-up appointment, which was on Monday, and brought her in today for repeat blood work.
This is where it gets interesting. She does indeed have some reduced kidney function, and had a critically low potassium level (2.5) so they wanted to give her fluids, and teach me how to do them (easy peasy compared to what I was expecting) and a second antibiotic shot (Convenia, a long-acting cephalosporin) and also sent me home with some Lactated Ringers For Veterinary Use and the equipment to administer it. I also picked up a small bag of kidney-friendly food.
I’ve prepared thousands of IV bags over the years, but never actually hung one. They want me to get about 150ml, 3 times a week. I can handle that.
), but here’s a great message board for that, which also helped me a lot: