I have a senior feral kitty with health issues that I've posted about quite a bit in the ferals forum. She's been indoors for a couple of months and we're starting to make progress on socializing her. Except... we have a vet appointment with a specialist on Thursday.
The last time we took her to the vet it was awful. We gave her 70 mg of gabapentin the night before and 100 mg about 3.5 hours before her appointment (she weighs six pounds). The gaba did not seem to sedate her in the slightest-- if anything it seemed to weirdly ramp her up. She was *extremely* jittery the morning of her appointment and would not go in her carrier to eat her food. I ended up having to grab her, which was awful and traumatic for both of us. She was fearful around me for a couple weeks afterwards and is only now starting to come back around to me (she didn't show a similar fear of my husband, who was not involved in the capture/vet visit).
I'm so worried our appointment Thursday will set us back. I had asked the vet after her last appointment if there's any other medication we could try and she simply recommended upping her gabapentin to 150 mg which seems incredibly high. I was reading that you could possibly give a benzo and I was going to ask them if there's any chance they could dispense a single dose, but I'm wondering if she didn't offer that due to it being a controlled substance. It would need to be something we could crush and leave in food or put in a pill pocket--there's no way we could squirt buprenex in her mouth.
Does anyone have similar experiences with Gabapentin not seeming to work? Does 150 mg sound incredibly high for such a tiny cat? It makes me so nervous to give that much to her. But at the same time I really don't know how we're going to get her into a carrier given how savvy she is unless she's somehow sedated.
I hate that we have to even do this but it's a follow-up appointment with the specialist who diagnosed her with the rare autoimmune disorder that she has, and I really want her to go back to this same specialist. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
The last time we took her to the vet it was awful. We gave her 70 mg of gabapentin the night before and 100 mg about 3.5 hours before her appointment (she weighs six pounds). The gaba did not seem to sedate her in the slightest-- if anything it seemed to weirdly ramp her up. She was *extremely* jittery the morning of her appointment and would not go in her carrier to eat her food. I ended up having to grab her, which was awful and traumatic for both of us. She was fearful around me for a couple weeks afterwards and is only now starting to come back around to me (she didn't show a similar fear of my husband, who was not involved in the capture/vet visit).
I'm so worried our appointment Thursday will set us back. I had asked the vet after her last appointment if there's any other medication we could try and she simply recommended upping her gabapentin to 150 mg which seems incredibly high. I was reading that you could possibly give a benzo and I was going to ask them if there's any chance they could dispense a single dose, but I'm wondering if she didn't offer that due to it being a controlled substance. It would need to be something we could crush and leave in food or put in a pill pocket--there's no way we could squirt buprenex in her mouth.
Does anyone have similar experiences with Gabapentin not seeming to work? Does 150 mg sound incredibly high for such a tiny cat? It makes me so nervous to give that much to her. But at the same time I really don't know how we're going to get her into a carrier given how savvy she is unless she's somehow sedated.
I hate that we have to even do this but it's a follow-up appointment with the specialist who diagnosed her with the rare autoimmune disorder that she has, and I really want her to go back to this same specialist. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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