Strange symptoms

First, this cat has been to the vet, but I'm not 100% comfortable with the diagnosis.

This is a 4 year-old, healthy 14 lb. male. He was fine on Tuesday, and, Tuesday night, around 11pm-midnight, he was doing his usual thing of getting himself situated to spend part of the night sleeping on me. I had to move him a little because he was lying on my throat.

The next morning at 8am, he was on a curved platform on the cat tree, and I could tell that he didn't feel good. When I tried to touch him around his back end, he made that warning noise that's halfway between a meow and a growl. I was worried about urinary blockage, but he growled at me when I tried to feel for his bladder. (I know how.) I decided to take him to the vet, but when he saw that I was getting the carrier ready, he got up and hid. He can move normally, but he yelped a bit when doing so. I took him to a vet I've found to be a very good diagnostician overall. They didn't have open appointments, so they kept him from 10am till 2pm and examined him between other appointments.

There is no fever and no urinary blockage. Their best guess was that he hurt himself somehow (indoors) during the night. He can be klutzy, and there is a wardrobe in another room he sometimes likes to get on top of. It's possible that he tried to get up there slipped and fell while I was asleep.

He's on three days of Onsior. He is eating and urinating, but he spends most of the time lying on the rug under the bed or in a cat bed. He seems to have to move very carefully. (I pulled a back muscle recently, so I can see that that makes sense.) When I try to pet him, his behavior alternates between seeming to enjoy being petted and pulling back and "grumbling" at me. He also seems unusually fearful.

I've seen many cat diseases, but never anything quite like this. Have any of you seen a cat that acted this way after a bad fall? The vet didn't think an x-ray was necessary.

Well, an x-ray might not show a pulled muscle, but it would show a popped joint or hairline fracture.  Even small fractures can be very painful, and some can turn problematic if they don't heal well. 

Your vet might have felt that the x-ray was not necessary, but I'm one of those folks who would rather know definitively than just hope it resolves itself.

Furmonster Mom said:

Your vet might have felt that the x-ray was not necessary, but I'm one of those folks who would rather know definitively than just hope it resolves itself.

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Well, I just got back from the second vet visit. It's been hard to gauge his progress. He seemed better last night and was eating, but then, this morning, he was back to being in a really bad mood and hadn't had a bowel movement in two days.

They did x-rays which didn't show any terribly serious problems, but they did show that he has a lot of fecal matter in his intestines. The vet emphasized that it wasn't dangerous impaction or blockage, but he said that the injury might make it hurt for him to assume the posture for a bowel movement, so we're giving him a stool-softener to try to make it easier for him to go. They also did a blood panel to cover all the bases.

I was about to buy a new computer, which I really need, but . . . there goes my budget for that.

Were his BM normal before the injury? When was the last time he had a BM?
It's possible Onsior is causing some fecal retention; or he hurt his sphincter muscle--though you'd think that would show up on the x-ray.
Hope he gets better soon. Let us know what the blood work shows.

David68 said:

Well, I just got back from the second vet visit....

They did x-rays ...  they did show that he has a lot of fecal matter in his intestines. The vet emphasized that it wasn't dangerous impaction or blockage, but he said that the injury might make it hurt for him to assume the posture for a bowel movement, so we're giving him a stool-softener to try to make it easier for him to go. They also did a blood panel to cover all the bases.

I was about to buy a new computer, which I really need, but . . . there goes my budget for that.

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Oh goodness!  I am very glad that you caught that problem, because lemme tell ya, about 8 years ago I had to deal with the same thing... only much, much worse.

My Pippen had gotten so badly blocked up that it was all the way to his stomach, which meant his food had nowhere to go but back out. 

This also meant that the bile had nowhere to go either, so it started flowing backwards into the liver. 

The blockage was also allowing all kinds of nasty bacteria to percolate and procreate in the colon, and they started crawling back to his organs as well. 

So, basically, his liver was attacked from both sides by bile and bacteria. 

It took 5 enemas in the course of 2 weeks to finally clear out his system, and another 3 months to get rid of the bacteria and recover the body weight he'd lost.  By then the damage had already been done.  His liver is permanently scarred, and he will be on supplements and medication for it for the rest of his life.

I totally sympathize with having to set back the computer for a while, but trust me... it could have been worse.

Good news. After two days of lactulose, he's started to have bowel movements again. Vet wants me to continue lactulose until things are clearly back to normal.

Blood work came back textbook normal.

It's still unclear as to exactly what happened. Did he fall and hurt himself, pulling a muscle in such a way that assuming the posture or straining to defecate was painful? Or was it a case of constipation that made him feel bad? I suppose his recovery may answer the question since it should take longer for a pulled muscle to heal than for constipation to resolve. Like the vet says, only the cat knows exactly where and how it hurts, and they can't tell us.

One of the problems of having four cats using the same litter boxes is that it's hard to keep track of these things. I am alert to frequent straining at the litter box for urinary blockages, but I saw no signs of this coming on. His behavior was perfectly normal just eight hours before he started growling if you tried to touch him. (I have one male cat that had a severe urinary blockage two years ago, and I periodically isolate him in a room with a litter box to make sure all is well.)

If it is an injury, I suspect that he was trying to jump to the top of a wardrobe in another bedroom and missed.

On top of this, I've had a female TNR rescue cat recovering from spay surgery in a downstairs bathroom while all this was going on. What a week...