Page 1 of 1

Potential FIV+, severe weight loss in senior

Posted: Sun Aug 25, 2019 11:26 am
by Benneh
Hello
Looking for some advice / help.

We rescued two neutered Tom's February last year.
At the cattery they'd had alot of dental work, so only had a few teeth remaining. Both weighed around 5 kilos.
Vets recommend one of them (George) should probably be around the 4 kilo weight ideally.

During the year they have been very affectionate, playful and we love them both.

May of this year, George required further dental work and had lost abit of weight (he was at 4 kilos at this stage).
Bloods were taken before the dental (we opted for the full works as we knew very little about his history) everything came back fine.
After the dental he was provided special foods which he was fine with but as time passed and weekly checkups he was losing weight at an alarming rate.

Examinations/checkups followed weekly thereafter for 2 months after which his weight dropped further to 3.1.
We did further blood tests and the vets noticed a slight elevation and wanted to do a biopsy to test for Fiv.
At this point George was very lethargic and his back leg muscles have wasted away (currently waddles around like John Wayne)

Now this is where we question if we did the right thing.
At this point George had been back and too to the vet and we thought he might just be stressed from the constant vet trips. So we told the vets we'd give him a break and see how he got on.

After two weeks of trying different things:
Microchip food bowl to stop the other cat eating all the food, new larger litter tray, about 5 different types of wet and dry food there was no improvement.

I broke down and booked an appointment with a different vet for a second opinion.

We did further tests and they noted the same elevations and asked to do a further blood test to check for tumors/cancer.
Results came back that it wasn't cancer.
We were then told that there's no sure way to test for Fiv but as we'd ruled everything out the assumption was FIV.

George's weight at this point was 2.8 kilo.

After this we switched George away from the kitten food and fatty food we'd been advised previously to just try and get him eating something. So we tried the "petit gourmet" pouches, which he loved he started eating, not much but more than he had been.
We also mixed in a small amount of colostrum to his food due to its bulking properties and immune system benefits which he didn't seem to mind.

After a week of his George had gone from eating less than 100g of wet food to eating just under 200g. Not back to where it should be but a start. He weighed around 2.9-3.1 kilo.
He also started eating a few royal canin senior biscuits.

We noticed George was licking stones alot around this time and reading about this it could be behavioural or a vitamin deficiency, he was also eating his cat litter which we quickly changed to a wood pellet based to stop this.

But he was bright eyed, bushy tailed and his coat had improved.

Since then he's gone down hill again going by our best estimates he's about 2.6-2.8 kilo now and is eating less than before.

Grabbing a piece of ham (smallest amount as we know its not good for him), raw mince or cooked chicken gets his attention and he will eat things like that fine to a point.

He doesn't seem to be in pain.
He's very lethargic and isolates himself in the spare bedroom.
But on occasion he will come through to see us, make a little meow and jump onto our bed and snuggle between us.
He pleads with us to go outside at times which breaks our hearts.

We don't know if we are doing what's right by him.

Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated we'd love to get him back to full health, we know that may not be the outcome but we want to exhaust every possible route before we have to take that route (before he can't cope)

Thank you

Re: Potential FIV+, severe weight loss in senior

Posted: Sat Sep 07, 2019 2:17 pm
by Cat-FAQ
The following link on the main Cat Chat site might be useful for you, if you haven’t already seen them:
Our FIV information page may be useful: https://www.catchat.org/index.php/fiv

For further advice email [email protected]

Hope that helps.
Eileen-N