(I hope.)
Divorce-free post here, I promise.
The Source of All the Trouble
This is Katala as of this morning. She’s two months away from turning nineteen. She’s also the cat who has been the focus of my attention recently. (Aside from Imogen, who developed a UTI this week. Expensive week.)
As you could probably tell from the above-linked post, I have been at my wits’ end trying to come up with a solution for the poor girl’s gastric issues. She’s terrifyingly sensitive to medications, but needs something to address the acid production problem, and every solution the vet and I had come up with so far had resulted in more problems rather than fewer. I was beginning to think I needed to say good-bye to her, just because there seemed to be no controlling the latest spate of issues.
But there was one thing I hadn’t tried. Every time I googled things like, “cat, diarrhea, vomiting” or “cat, pepcid, diarrhea” or “cat, vomiting” I kept seeing references to slippery elm bark.
I know that cats are not to be dosed with human medications or with herbal supplements. Their systems are different from ours. Spider bites don’t bother them nearly as much as they do us, yet chocolate can kill them. If their systems responded to things in the exact same way ours do, they’d be humans. So I was leery of trying an herbal remedy. Because the point is to NOT kill her or make things worse. On the other hand, she responds so badly to manufactured substances that I thought herbs might be a bit more gentle on her system and not have the nasty side effects. So I did some research on slippery elm bark and cats.
When I discovered a reference to the benefits of slippery elm bark on one of the feline CRF information sites I trust, I figured it was probably okay, but I wanted a bit more reassurance. Which is when I found this note from a DVM about how slippery elm is one of the few herbal substances that we can give to cats and dogs. Both sites had recipes for slippery elm bark syrup. Knowing how delicate Katala’s system is, I decided to go with the one that seemed to have the smallest dosage first, since I could always up the concentration if it seemed to be working but wasn’t working enough.
On Wednesday, I went to the store and bought some organic slippery elm powder. I made the syrup. Once it was cool, I gave it to Katala. It didn’t appear to affect her adversely, so I was hoping it would quell the vomiting or at the very least, clear up the diarrhea so I could keep giving her the Pepcid without the awful side effect. She still did a bunch of barfing in the middle of the night (so I gave her a Pepcid), and also had some loose stools, but they weren’t nearly as bad as they had been. Still, I was up every 30-60 minutes for a while there on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I began to despair.
However. I figured I needed to give the Pepcid time to leave her system (if I could), and also for the slippery elm to really begin to work. And last night, I slept All. Night. Long. No vomit sounds woke me. When I got up this morning, there was no barf anywhere and no loose stool anywhere.
For the first time since early January, the cat appears to be having no gastric issues. She’s snoring behind me in the chair right now, and she had her last dose of Pepcid at 3:55am Thursday. We’ll see what happens at 45 hours or so post-dose, since that’s when she usually starts feeling punky again, but I think we may have a solution. Of course, it’s going to take a bit more work than just shoving a pill down the cat’s throat once every day or so, since she gets the syrup four times a day and the timing is kind of precise (at least 5 minutes before a meal). Plus, I have to make the syrup every eight days or so, but if it keeps her comfortable and vomit/diarrhea-free, I don’t care. It’s worth the work. I’ll keep you posted, but I think we may have found a solution, at least for now.
And because she was stretched out in the sunshine and I felt like the relief and sunbeams were warming my heart in the same way, here’s a little gratuitous Quickly to warm your morning.
Gratuitous Quickly