r/RenalCats

I'm taking Bobyo to the vet tomorrow morning for his PCR test. His stomach is visibly larger and we cannot wait any longer. We still need 961 AED ($261 USD) for his GS treatment to begin. Every share and contribution brings him closer. 🙏

Account name: Creatures World PT FDS & ACS LLC SP

Account number: 0572705984001

IBAN: AE380400000572705984001

Hi everyone! First time actually taking the time to post on Reddit, but I’m very frustrated with the situation with our 5 year old female cat. Also sorry for the long post!

We took her to the ER vet on 2/27 where they diagnosed her with a UTI & sent us home with Clavamox to treat her. She seemed to be getting better over the couple weeks she was on it.

3/19 she started acting lethargic again. Got her into our normal vet they did in-house urinalysis, blood work, & x-rays. Those results showed swelling in her kidneys & they told us to take her to a speciality vet for hospitalization.

3/20 we take her to the ER specialty vet. Her CREA level was 8 something (don’t have paperwork handy for exact #s) and BUN was in the hundreds. They put her back in clavamox & gave her IV fluids. She was hospitalized for 48 hours & then they sent her home.

Once home she started crashing within 24 hours & she was re/hospitalized on 3/23. This time they do a full urine culture & find out the bacteria is resistant to clavamox & they start her on Cefpodoxime. She was hospitalized from 3/23-4/1. Her CREA came down to the 3s. They sent us home with antibiotics, phos binder & subQ fluids. She HATES all oral meds, but we are managing.

She was receiving 100ml twice a day, which we were able to reduce to once a day. She was on the mend. We were going in for rechecks and her CREA was holding in the low 4s, was found she didn’t need the phos binder and we finished her course of antibiotics.

Cut to this weekend 4/11 & she starts not eating again. I take her back to the vet. CREA is climbing back to 5.7 and the full urine culture they did right after finishing the antibiotics shows she still has bacteria & now it is resistant to the Cefpodoxime.

They are now recommending we re-hospitalize her, which we can’t do cause we’re basically out of money at this point for that. They are having us up her SubQ fluids again to 100ml twice a day, starting her on Trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole & want to perform a serum test that will tell us how the antibiotic is working.

I’m honestly just so frustrated with the vet and the whole situation at this point. I’m exhausted and just looking for support/advice/recommedations. Curious is anyone has been through similar and had good outcomes?

Happy to answer any questions.

Thank for reading all that if you made it this far!

Hi there,

My 10 year old cat was just diagnosed with stage 4 kidney disease 5 days ago, and I feel like it’s progressed so quickly since then.

Last night he was extremely wobbly and lethargic. So much so that I was scared he wasn’t going to make it through the night.

But this morning he jumped up on my bed, still very wobbly, but bright and looking for pets. Seeming more like himself.

Is it normal for evenings to be worse like this? Kinda like sundowning, for example?

I thought we’d have a couple of weeks with him, but I’m realizing that we might only have days. My heart is absolutely shattered, but I’m doing everything I can to keep him comfortable until it’s his time.

Thanks in advance for any responses 🙏🏻

****Last person who reached out has not gotten back to me since March. So am reposting******

Sooo many people on this subreddit have generously donated to me when I needed it. It is unfortunate circumstances, but I want to continue paying it forward to someone else who could also benefit from this in Milky’s honor.

The steak frites is technically not CKD prescribed food, but it is the lowest phosphorus percentage in standard cat food - purchased this for the days I needed to make money stretch before buying more of their therapeutic food.

I also have:

5 mg Prednisolone tablets

5.4 mg of Apoquel

Bag of Greenies Pill Pockets

A little bit of Pet Wellbeing Kidney Support Gold supplement

250 mcg flixotide (for any of my fellow asthmatic cats). I honestly couldn’t tell you how many puffs are left, probably more than half though.

It’s a constant reminder of him and cannot hang onto this anymore……I hope I can help someone else out.

Hi everyone,

I’m going through a really difficult time with my 11-year-old female cat and I’m looking for advice or shared experiences.

On March 28th, she stopped eating, became lethargic, and started sitting by her litter box as if she was trying to urinate but couldn’t. My first thought was kidney failure.

At our first vet visit (we had just moved and didn’t yet have a trusted vet), we were told it might be a hairball issue. X-rays, including a barium study, were done, and she was treated for a possible obstruction. I guess I wanted to believe that there was a hairball issue because it’s much easier than kidney failure.

However, her bloodwork at that time already showed elevated kidney values (creatinine was around 3.97), and nothing was mentioned to us about kidney disease. No treatment or guidance was given regarding her kidney function, which in retrospect is very concerning.

A few days later, her condition didn’t improve, so I decided to see another vet. Further evaluation at a different clinic revealed advanced kidney failure (stage 4). And I have been told that she may have between six months and a year remaining. Of course, it was devastating. I lost 3 kg in a couple of days but I’m trying to stay strong so I can be there for her and help her feel better. I know that everything in life has a limited time, and no matter how much I want to hold on, at some point she will slip away from me. I can’t help but think about the emptiness that losing her would leave inside me. She has been with me through all the turning points of my life. When we first went to the second clinic, she had to stay there for two days, and it didn’t feel like home at all without her. I can’t imagine a life without her, but I also feel like it would be selfish to let her suffer just so I can have one more day with her.

Since then, she has been on intensive fluid therapy. Even though I’m sensitive to things like blood, I’m trying to handle the process at home so that she can feel more comfortable.

Over the past week:

She has been receiving daily fluid therapy (isotonic saline and lactated Ringer’s solution)

Her blood values have improved:

Creatinine dropped from 3.97 to 2.94

BUN dropped from 64 to 42

SDMA decreased from 77 to 62

However, her phosphorus is still high (around 7.8)

Our next visit is on Tuesday.

Clinically:

She drinks water and urinates frequently

She has started eating small amounts again (boiled chicken and some renal dry food (royal canine) and canned recovery food

She responds to us, makes eye contact, moves around even tries to play her favorite game with us.

But she has fluctuating energy levels and sometimes hides or seems uncomfortable, especially when the effects of fluids wear off

We also started a phosphate binder, but I’m struggling to administer it consistently.

Recently, IV access has become difficult — she reacts strongly, likely due to vein irritation — so probably after vet visit we are transitioning to subcutaneous fluids at home.

Emotionally, I’m struggling with the balance between continuing treatment and not wanting her to suffer. She still has “good moments,” but the ups and downs are very hard to interpret.

My questions:

Has anyone seen similar improvement in values in such a short time, and how did things progress afterward?

How do you manage appetite and phosphate binders in picky cats?

At what point did you feel it was no longer fair to continue?

I want to do what’s best for her — not just keep her alive, but make sure she’s comfortable.

Thanks for your time.

We let our sweet baby Nugget pass the rainbow bridge yesterday. He had a little high but was much much slower than in any other highs and needed multiple laying down breaks during his ways. It seemed that he sometimes forgot what he was on the way for. Food was eaten but in such miniscule amounts that it's not worth mentioning. He was still very interested in us and our doings and seemed to want to follow us. He drank for MINUTES at the fountain, it went as long as him taking 10 Minutes to drink. The illness progressed what seemed to be overnight so much farther. We used that little window of feeling good he had yesterday to euthanize him.

I'll miss his face-cleaning sessions on furniture corners, his sunbathing while laying on his back looking like a fat sack of potatoes, his demands for liver sausage treats, his nightly concerts, the noise he makes when jumping from places too high and landing on his face (it was a little painless oomph), him laying down in shoes with his stump and his "stumpling" (we called it that when he used his stump to do things). He had so much character it's unbelieveable.

I kind of also have to vent here because it was traumatic to me, please don't read ahead if you're sensitive to details of it. If any mod finds it wrong or sees a rule-break that I'm very likely very tone-deaf to then please contact me before just deleting my post and i'll remove this part and make another. And please be merciful, it's still all too raw and every little thing kind of shatters me right now.

The vet told us she'll administer everything subq but didn't do "the last blow" that way. She didn't tell me to look away or close my eyes for the last part. It looked so brutal and that brutal image of his peaceful passing is now burned into my memory. I now feel like it wasn't peaceful. I never euthanized a pet before, all pets we've had prior passed naturally and just dropped dead or fell asleep, this was my first time. I am in no way promoting letting your babies pass from renal diseases naturally, being azotemic and uremic feels horrible. I know and heavily emphasize euthanasia is important for cases like these. I just kind of.... needed proper explanation and guidance through that rather than a slip-slap and doneso thing. He also just felt so weird to the touch. There was something hard just below the ribs and no one cared to explain what it was. She did give me a condolence card with a quote in it, and it makes healing a bit easier. I've never seen or heard of a vet doing that.

Hey everyone, my cat Tora (5) was bitten badly in her leg by her sister recently and had to be sedated to get stitches. After that she was not recovering and was just getting more and more apathic by the day. No poop or If any just diarrhea. No eating. We had to feed her a tonic with a syringe orally. Very unusual bowel movement. Unable to keep herself on the legs. Additionally she was in severe pain.

We had to send her to a clinic and they discovered values a 620 mmol/l and immediately started Infusion. She was there for a few days and it now plateaued at 230. She started eating but very minimal amounts.

She has been home for a couple days and drinks sufficiently but still only eats like maybe a quarter bowl a day at max no matter what kind of food we give her. We got some renal snacks she likes, but that cant be all she is eating all day ...She used to be 4kg but now i can feel her spine clearly and she is not stable on her legs.

I don't really know how to get her to eat. I tried everything to make the food as appealing as possible and encouraged her but she just isn't interested.

What should I do? We are going to the vet tomorrow but I don't really want to wait to hear what the doctor hast to say. Since she was treated she only got worse so i don't know If i can trust in what they will say.