Hey there,
I'm afraid this post will probably be a bit longer. If she doesn't kill herself, I'm not sure I won't at some point; anyway, here it goes:
I've outlined some already in a previous post (Cat Diarrhoea), but unfortunately, while the diarrhoea is gone, so is her appetite.Or rather, she won't stick with a food for more than a day before she shuns it. It worsened severely when my girlfriend had left for a bit over a week and our cat decided it was a fine idea to stay outside (moment of inattention and she slipped out; we wanted to control her environment to rule out other factors) for 4 or 5 days. And wouldn't come in; she probably didn't have anything/very little to eat during that time, evidenced by her loss of weight.
After that stunt, she slowly started developing some sort of tremors/spasms, similarly to the cat in this video ( ; the user has more videos of his cat twitching/having tremors/spasms). I.e. weird involuntary shaking of the paw but also all over her body. We naturally took her to the vet who x-rayed her (everything's fine) and had a blood test done (all values are normal, no markers for diseases present at all). We've ruled out neurological or nervous issues since these tremors don't affect her gait and don't happen all the time. Perhaps I should mention that she's never had a fever throughout any of this. The vet did find pain in her lower back of unknown origin and a minor irritation on the back of her throat; he prescribed her painkillers both to take away the pain and for their anti-inflammatory qualities.
Based on the symptoms as a whole, we presume it's due to lack of food/regular food intake and some sort of anxiety she's developed. She's had bouts of constipation/diarrhoea on and off, alternating between the two - maybe it's because her stool may be too hard and she's sensitive to that? It's fairly odd considering that her weight is the same since the last time she was at the vet's and was on the scales; while there is no weight loss noticeable between these two instances (she's at perfect weight at 4.1kg/~9lbs), we can tell she had gained weight in the meantime and lost it accordingly. Moreover, the blood levels are fine, which doesn't quite add up, either. The tremors were better after we fed her some special food against adverse food reactions we got from the vet - however, our little idiot thought it fair to shun it, thus forcing us to change the food once again (we were supposed to feed her that exclusively, yet she didn't touch it in two days and she'd have continued starving herself).
Has anyone of you ever had to deal with such an issue? I know it's likely best to prepare food ourselves (she's VERY into human food; we didn't feed her scraps often though, only the odd piece of sausage/meat here and there perhaps once a week at most), as was recommended by Mamanyt1953 in the other thread - given the uncertainty of what was going on, we didn't go ahead with it yet. Also, it's still unclear what this is and how to best address it without worsening it. Any advice would be very welcome on how to best approach this; I fear cats' diets are easy to disimprove and I'd hate to do something wrong.
Thanks in advance for your replies :-)
I'm afraid this post will probably be a bit longer. If she doesn't kill herself, I'm not sure I won't at some point; anyway, here it goes:
I've outlined some already in a previous post (Cat Diarrhoea), but unfortunately, while the diarrhoea is gone, so is her appetite.Or rather, she won't stick with a food for more than a day before she shuns it. It worsened severely when my girlfriend had left for a bit over a week and our cat decided it was a fine idea to stay outside (moment of inattention and she slipped out; we wanted to control her environment to rule out other factors) for 4 or 5 days. And wouldn't come in; she probably didn't have anything/very little to eat during that time, evidenced by her loss of weight.
After that stunt, she slowly started developing some sort of tremors/spasms, similarly to the cat in this video ( ; the user has more videos of his cat twitching/having tremors/spasms). I.e. weird involuntary shaking of the paw but also all over her body. We naturally took her to the vet who x-rayed her (everything's fine) and had a blood test done (all values are normal, no markers for diseases present at all). We've ruled out neurological or nervous issues since these tremors don't affect her gait and don't happen all the time. Perhaps I should mention that she's never had a fever throughout any of this. The vet did find pain in her lower back of unknown origin and a minor irritation on the back of her throat; he prescribed her painkillers both to take away the pain and for their anti-inflammatory qualities.
Based on the symptoms as a whole, we presume it's due to lack of food/regular food intake and some sort of anxiety she's developed. She's had bouts of constipation/diarrhoea on and off, alternating between the two - maybe it's because her stool may be too hard and she's sensitive to that? It's fairly odd considering that her weight is the same since the last time she was at the vet's and was on the scales; while there is no weight loss noticeable between these two instances (she's at perfect weight at 4.1kg/~9lbs), we can tell she had gained weight in the meantime and lost it accordingly. Moreover, the blood levels are fine, which doesn't quite add up, either. The tremors were better after we fed her some special food against adverse food reactions we got from the vet - however, our little idiot thought it fair to shun it, thus forcing us to change the food once again (we were supposed to feed her that exclusively, yet she didn't touch it in two days and she'd have continued starving herself).
Has anyone of you ever had to deal with such an issue? I know it's likely best to prepare food ourselves (she's VERY into human food; we didn't feed her scraps often though, only the odd piece of sausage/meat here and there perhaps once a week at most), as was recommended by Mamanyt1953 in the other thread - given the uncertainty of what was going on, we didn't go ahead with it yet. Also, it's still unclear what this is and how to best address it without worsening it. Any advice would be very welcome on how to best approach this; I fear cats' diets are easy to disimprove and I'd hate to do something wrong.
Thanks in advance for your replies :-)