Please help with liquid Vibramycin/doxycycline.

My girl Snuggles has bronchitis/pneumonia, and was prescribed the liquid for oral dosing. It's pink, smells nasty, and apparently tastes awful because she absolutely will not take it. I have a small syringe that I try to dose her with and she fights me so viciously that much of the dose is wasted.

I've tried saturating her kibble with it, and tried sneaking it into her water. No dice. My vet says it is what it is. Please help, because this isn't working.

Yeah, no having someone compound that one. Thankfully our Flowerbelle LOVES strawberry yogurt, and so she LIKED that stuff!

So there's my question... does your kitty like yogurt? Will she eat strawberry yogurt? IF you can get her to eat that, you might be able to hide it in there...

Otherwise I think you MIGHT be looking at an investment in a cat bag:
They show the picture with the legs out... but basically you have all the zippers zipped other than the top. You quickly velcro the neck part in place, then zip them in. They can't struggle. And if you feed her a treat after syringing her the meds, it'll probably go pretty stress-free.

Doxycycline is available in tablets and capsules, which I think are way easier to administer than nasty tasting liquid meds: http://www.marvistavet.com/html/body_vibramycin.html I would ask the vet (who really doesn't sound very helpful or compassionate to me) to get you one of those instead (tabs are probably easiest, as long as you coat it in butter and follow it with a water chaser so it doesn't get stuck in her throat: http://www.catinfo.org/?link=pillingcats).

I know doxy is available in pill form, and asked my vet about it at the time. She preferred the liquid doxy for the bronchitis despite my insistence at my inability to adminster liquids to Flowerbelle. :dk:

my vet prescribed doxy in liquid for a URI when my kitten was really young. how old is she?
my boy hadn't developed his full adult teeth up the back so the way that worked the best for us was someone would hold his body, and the 2nd person would slip it in the side of the mouth towards the back and squirt it. It would go straight down his throat and he couldn't spit it back up. we struggled for ages trying to get it from the front of his mouth until a vet told us that was the way to administer it and we never had problems after that.

hope this helps 

The best people I've found for showing and teaching how to administer drugs are the vet nurses.  They are the ones that do most of the administration at the vets, and once the vet had to get one in to give Rufus a worm pill - there were three spat round the consulting room by then and Rufus had drawn blood. 

Thanks.

I took your advice and also watched some videos on liquid med admin. It works significantly better now, entering from the side of the mouth. The problem is that it's a 7ml dosage. It's a lot for her to suffer down. Oh, as someone asked, she's 18-years-old.

Probably too late since you posted in Feb.  

Just had doxy prescribed by my vet for my cat, and vet called it into a compounding pharmacy where they made it "chicken-flavored" liquid.

Cat likes it.

Apparently, most liquid meds can be made by a compounding pharmacy which adds flavoring that cat likes so that it's easy to administer.