This weekend (and even half of last week) has been devoted to my two very sick kitties. Francois and Burrito have both been digestively ill for a week. One has been vomiting and the other diarrhea-ing all over himself…yeah, it hasn’t been much fun but the clean-up is providing (much unwanted) practice for the little poopy one who resides within.

After not eating for two full days, I really wanted to take Burrito into the vet but I had to attend a doctor appointment myself (plus the good vet wasn’t working until Saturday). I decided I would take them both on Saturday, so that is what we did.

When they both started feeling ill, it was within 24 hours of having a rabies vaccination and I thought maybe it was them just feeling a little icky due to the shot or maybe the stress of having gone to the vet. However, as the illness progressed and worsened through out the week I knew there had to be another culprit. Their symptoms were different, but both were experiencing digestive problems.

I came up with two scenarios:

1. We had sprayed some eco-friendly insect killer around the sliding doors to our balcony, as there were little flying insects coming through any crevice they could find during a storm last Sunday night. I thought that I was careful to keep the cats away and get up all the dead bugs and excess bug spray, but I decided that perhaps I had missed a spot and they got into it.
2. The illnesses are not related to one another at all. Perhaps Francois’ diarrhea was from a bad batch of food or who know what else and Burrito’s vomiting and lack of appetite was from an intestinal blockage from the string he ate a couple of months ago. He yakked up part of the string for certain, but I knew there was still a chance part of it remained.

So, the vet says they are non-related illness and it is a fluke that it occurred at the same time. As much as that sucks, it is better that it not be the bug spray having poisoned them since that has serious long-term effects, not to mention I could never forgive myself.

Francois simply has an upset stomach, perhaps from the rabies shot or whatever else may have caused it. A little medicine to control the diarrhea and one to reduce the inflammation of his colon and he is all better, at least getting there.

Burrito has intestinal blockage. The poor kid was a little bit dehydrated so he received IV fluids and an enema to remove as much hard waste from his colon as possible. After the enema, they still felt a little hardened section of intestines and did an x-ray. The x-ray showed nothing, which isn’t uncommon, but the next option is for exploratory surgery and I am not ready for that. The vet recommended that we force feed him every two hours and see if we can keep food in him…if it comes up, then there is a definite blockage and if he poops it out there isn’t a blockage.

And that is what we have been doing this weekend.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under Fuzzy kids, ickyness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.