Friday Cat Blogging: Then And Now

Eddie, maybe a couple of weeks after he joined us:

And a more recent picture:

Oh, I wish he'd stay small forever!  Not really.  He is a handful and the other cats have had just about enough of him after he's out and about for five minutes.

In a couple of weeks he goes in for an echocardiogram.  The vet has heard a heart murmur when examining him.  Also, he had at least one episode - maybe two, I forget - of panting when playing.  Cats shouldn't pant.  The murmur and the panting suggest a possible heart problem.  The murmur has gotten softer.  It's possible he had something like a small hole in his heart and that it's closing up on its own.  The echo is to verify whether or not there's a problem that needs to be considered when he goes under for neutering.

You know, our cats have a lot of problems.  What's up with that?  As with people, stress can cause health problems in cats.  Some think that there should be no more than two, maybe three, cats in one household.  The idea is that the more cats there are, the more stress between the cats.  I can see that, although I can also see where a whole litter that grows up together does better on the stress management front than adult cats introduced later in life.  Kevin thinks that the vet has said a few things that, in his mind, suggest that maybe some of our cats' problems are due to the number of cats we have.  I don't like to think that, but it's certainly plausible.

I had, and still have, some misgivings about keeping Eddie.  I'm not sure it was the right thing to do, for him or for the other cats.  I think he might have benefitted from playing with other kittens and young cats at the shelter.  He would've interacted with a lot of different people at the shelter.  But he's here now and I don't see that he's going anywhere anytime soon.  And here he's benefitting from the total mushball that Kevin is about him.  I would have liked for him to meet a lot more people so he would be more comfortable around strangers.  It takes him a little while to warm up to strangers now.  But I just don't know a ton of strangers to introduce him to.

Wrt his potential heart problem, I'm sure that's something congenital and that it's not related to the number of cats here.  Other things could be stress-related.  I think IBD and maybe diabetes (in cats) could be stress-related.  Feline diabetes is interesting bc cats can be diabetic one day and the next day they're not.  I'm pretty sure that for people with certain diabetes, once you're diabetic you stay diabetic.  But cats can go in and out of a diabetic condition.  I guess that's why monitoring is so important.

Back to the number of cats here: After this, no more cats until we're down to one or none!  You heard it here first!

Comments

[jason]

Just so you know, I have two cats who have had the same symptoms--evidence of heart murmurs and episodes of breathlessness--and in both cases (they're biological brothers), it turned out to be asthma. Keeping that in check has resolved the murmurs and allowed them to run and play like nothing is wrong. Let's hope you have similar luck with it being something less serious than it at first appears.

[Annie]

I hadn't even thought about what else it could be. Asthma is definitely manageable and certainly preferable to other possibilities. Thanks for mentioning that, Jason.