Frequent UTI's?

Has anyone had problems with their cat experiencing frequent UTI's?  

My cat Stella recently completed her third round of antibiotics (three different meds, different durations, up to 4 weeks).  Within a week to completing, she is back to straining, frequent small quantities of urination, and spotting blood.  Initial urinalysis showed eColi.  Initial US found a polyp (or TCC?) in the bladder following four weeks of amoxycillian, but subsequent US, showed nothing.  My vet thinks the polyp was a response to infection from the original UTI.

She eats nothing but well-hydrated quality wet food.

Any ideas or personal experience here?

Thanks!

First, I would totally analyze the food she is eating.  Is it just muscle meat, organ meat (by products) and fat?  Or does it have a significant amount of carbohydrates in it?  Some canned foods these days have all sorts of fruits and veggies like carrots, sweet potato, peas and potatoes or other starches that actually raise the carbohydrate level above the 10% maximum it should be, and the ones with "sauce" and "gravy" are the worst offenders here.  Does your food give you the ingredients on a can, or can they be found online?  Secondly, does your food give you a calorie count?  Sometimes you can spot carbs because the calorie count is higher than it might be otherwise.  Third, do you feed her three or four little meals throughout the day or does she just get one big meal?  I suspect she is making struvite crystals in her urine (that's what my rescue cat that taught me all this was doing) and they can act like little shards of glass and irritate the bladder and urethra and cause the bleeding and straining and pain.  Most of the time, these cats do not have a "UTI" which is a common abbreviation for Urinary Tract INFECTION, but actually they have urinary tract Irritation.  Two vets gave up n MJ because she was just like your cat, constantly having recurring bouts of this.  No amounts of antibiotics worked because the problem wasn't bacterial.  It was a combination of her situation, her food, and her tendency to have neutral or alkaline urine.  Struvite crystals dissolve in acidic urine, and the normal pH of a cat's urine when eating its natural wild diet and living free is 6.0 to 6.5 as an average (7.0 is neutral), with swings throughout the day as low as 5.8 and as high as 6.8, but MJ was tending to run at a 7.0 or 7.5 when I got her from the humane society, and she was peeing blood every 15 minutes and grunting and moaning and straining.  It was heartbreaking!  She had already been on back to back courses of antibiotics and if I couldn't fix her problem, she was going to be put to sleep so she wouldn't keep suffering.  The first three weeks were a bit rough but after that, she has had zero recurring problems and it has been nine months!!  Mostly I do nothing special anymore except keep her on canned food with no carbs in it.  Once in awhile I leave down an empty litter box and she is always willing to pee in it and I test her urine pH again, and it's always 6.0, so once I got her off the dry food she had lived on at the shelter and on to a grain free chicken based food, she is maintenance free now.  During the transition period, she received pain medication (buprenex) and an antispasmodic for a few days.  I put incontinence pads in litter boxes so I could see what her pee was looking like, and the blood went away after about a week.  I also purchased natural L-methionine and added just a sprinkle to each of her meals for the first few months because it is a urinary acidifier and it would help with dissolving the crystals she had and preventing the pH from getting up to 7.0 where more struvite crystals could form.  She also received a mild tranquilizer for the first week, until the pain was gone and she was no longer peeing blood, because pain causes stress and stress can cause the pH to rise, so while she was in pain, we kept her as calm as she could be (she's a pretty high strung cat).  At the beginning I tested her urine three times a day, morning, noon and night.  When it would start to get above 6.5, she got the Organic Apple Cider Vinegar treatment -- 4 parts water to 1 part Bragg's Organic Apple Cider Vinegar - 1 cc. every half hour until the pH came back down to 6.5 or less.  Eventually she stabilized on her own.  She hasn't had the vinegar or the L-methionine in months.

There is another kind of crystals cats can get that are NOT dependent on the pH called calcium oxalate crystals, and these can form bladder stones.  The way to prevent those is by making sure the urine is not too concentrated, which is the reason for the wet food diet.  Early on, I also made tuna water for her to drink to encourage her to drink more water.  (1 can tuna placed in a 1 qt jar with distilled water, shake, let it sit awhile, then strain out the tuna.  Keep the tuna water in the fridge and put some down in a small dish near the water bowl.)  As I said, this is a cat who had recurrences again and again until I took her and put her on this regimen, and this saved her life.  The buprenex and urinary antispasmodic you need to get from your vet, but you can get everything else you will need by yourself. 

I got my pH test strips on eBay, from a U.S. seller because I needed them quickly.  (You can get the same ones from Singapore or China for less money, but these are $2.79 a pack with free shipping, so I recommend this particular seller.)  Get 2 packs, and you will not run out, ever.  I think each pack has 180 strips.  http://www.ebay.com/itm/Laboratory-...7a8b2b9&pid=100005&rk=4&rkt=6&sd=221768312130

I got the Bragg's Organic Apple Cider Vinegar at my local supermarket for $5.99.  I still have plenty of that left.

I got my L-methionine from Source Naturals as a free form powder.  The L-methionine is the natural form of the amino acid that is found in muscle meat.  The DL-methionine used in those urinary prescription cat foods is manufactured from chemicals, thus it contains both the L and the D isotope, rather than the natural L isotope alone which is how it occurs in meat.  One bottle of 100 grams of the powder cost about $14 on Amazon back in September and I still have half the bottle left, even though I've shared some with another friend in rescue who had a cat who blocked, and he too has had no recurrences after being on this same program for 6 months. 
There are two places I get the grain free chicken & turkey cat food for her:  Tractor Supply Grain Free Turkey & Giblets, and Abound  Grain Free Turkey & Giblets only available at the Kroger family of stores.  Each 5.5 oz. can costs 69 cents right now.  Sometimes Abound costs 79 cents.  They smell exactly the same and each has the same ingredients, and each can is 193 calories.  (I suspect they may be made by the same manufacturer and sold to these two companies from a third source but I can't prove it.)  There are other good foods too and there is a list of most of the foods and their contents that you can find on www.catinfo.org, although it doesn't include a lot of the newer foods.  As you learn to read labels well, you can figure out a lot also. As you can see, you don't have to spend a fortune on prescription food - you can actually do very well choosing your own food wisely and supplementing with the L-methionine through the transition period until there are no more crystals and the urine pH stays in the safe range.

If you were to buy one case of Hills Prescription Diet Urinary Care C/D, it would cost you $43.64 for 24 cans (from Chewy's) or $1.81 per can and it is not as good a diet as the grain-free foods I just described since it contains very little muscle meat and a bunch of carbs cats don't need.  (Ingredients:  Pork by-products, water, pork liver, chicken, rice, corn starch, oat fiber, chicken fat, fish meal, corn gluten meal, chicken liver flavor, calcium sulfate, guar gum, fish oil, brewers dried yeast, dextrose, dl-methionine, choline chloride, vitamins (vitamin E supplement, thiamine mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, niacin supplement, calcium pantothenate, vitamin B12 supplement, riboflavin supplement, biotin, folic acid, vitamin D3 supplement), potassium chloride, taurine, cysteine, dried egg yolk, minerals (zinc oxide, ferrous sulfate, manganous oxide, calcium iodate), glycine, iodized salt, potassium citrate, calcium carbonate, beta-carotene.)

PS - MJ looks a lot like Stella, maybe they have similar personalities!