Advice desired - cat gets sick when I travel! Not good!

kkmauss

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Hello everyone,

I'm a newbie here, but have had cats all my life. Right now I seem to have a problem with one that I've never had before and I'd like some advice and thoughts.

Jango is a Siamese, very smart, very sweet but hypersensitive to things that are not right in his environment. He gets "out of sorts" at what I think are the smallest things, and things my other cats (including his full brother) shrug at.

I don't travel extensively, but do go away for weekends now and again. He knows what suitcases look like and always gets sad and depressed when he sees them. But if I'm only gone one night, or maybe two at the most, there's not time for serious problems to set in. Then I tried to take a longer trip......

I hadn't been away on a long vacation in two years. I asked a good friend of mine who knows my kids well if he would kitty sit them. Five days into my trip I got a phone call saying "Jango really isn't right - he's just sitting in the same spot and he looks terribly depressed - what should I do?" I decided wisely to cut my trip short and come home the next day. I got home and found him with a fever, weak, depressed, and walking like he was in real pain. I promptly took him to the vet -- he couldn't say for sure what was wrong, so he gave me some antibiotics and ran a bunch of tests for really bad things.

The happy ending to the tale is that the tests for FIP, FELV, etc all came back negative and he responded to antibiotics, so now our best guess is a kidney/ bladder / something in the digestive system infection. What I'm wondering is, did he go on a hunger strike starting the day we left and is that what caused the infection? And even more importantly, what can I do in the future to solve this problem? I can't go on trips constantly wondering if my cat is going to die while I'm gone!


Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Karen
 

gardenandcats

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Do you just have the one cat? If you do maybe getting him a buddy would help.
 
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kkmauss

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I have three cats -- Jango, his full brother Crowley and a new addition named Gypsy. She's about four months old, and they have all been getting along wonderfully, so I can hardly think he stressed out about the new kitten in the house. (THough he sure did the first three or four days she appeared - he wouldn't even come upstairs!)

thanks
Karen
 
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