Friends on Friday

Thank you for all the lovely messages about Freddie. He was a beautiful little boy, and we will always remember him.

I wanted to finish the week with some good news. About me!

                                           

 As most of you know I had some health problems last year. I had lots of testing done and while it kept showing that I had some problems going on, it couldn't pinpoint what it was that was actually causing the problems. After doing various food and medication trials, all of which made little to no difference, I was finally put on a high dose of steroids that made a big difference. It cleared up my problems, though it did make me pretty lethargic.

 Once we'd arrived in our new house and I was settled, we started the slow process of weaning me off the medication. We did it over a period of nearly 6 weeks until I was taking 0 tablets every day. I have been completely off the medication for several weeks now, and I have remained completely stable. My energy levels have bounced back! We had been warned that once we reached a threshold limit I might relapse, but that never happened. The vets had warned us that I might be a cat who needed to be on medication for the rest of my life, and there are some big drawbacks to being on steroids long term. So it's a huge, massive, wonderful thing that so far everything is going well.

I am still on my hypoallergenic food and will be for a little while yet. We wanted to have a very clear distinction between stopping the medication and weaning off the food so that if I did have a relapse we would know what it was related to. But to tell you a secret, I have stolen a couple of Suey and Lishy's crunchies a couple of times and shown no ill effect. I also pounced on a piece of tuna mum dropped, and my poop remained firm.

It's still a bit of a mystery about what kicked all this off. One development that my vet was very interested in was that just before we moved out of my old house, I found a bit of dog food in our garden. While that doesn't sound very interesting on it's own, we used to live next door to a barky dog. There were a couple of stories locally about someone throwing poisoned dog food into yards with so called nuisance dogs. According to my vet if that had been what happened it could have been enough to cause my rather dramatic early symptoms, and cause the long term irritation. It would also apparently explain why the biopsies showed blood and haemmoraging in my guts but showed no actual cause.

Regardless, we are very very happy that right now I am off all the medication and am completely symptom free. Have a happy weekend everyone :)