Sudden passing of 9 year old Oscar

[Brycen.Larissa]

Long post.
We have just suddenly lost our seemingly healthy 9 year old Cat Oscar. My husband and I are absolutely heart broken and looking for any answer possible.
Over the past 12 months Oscar would have “episodes” of falling onto his side, yowling, and pooping. They would last about 1 minute and then he would be totally fine. He was rushed to the vet multiple times after these epsiodes ontop of regular appointments and given a clean bill of health. I suspected siezures, but the vet didn’t ever seem to think it was.
These episodes seemed to happen after he would get scared (he was a big scaredy-cat and everything would make him run and hide so it’s hard to say if that correlates or not.) Two days ago the doorbell scared him and he ran downstairs. We heard the yowling starting so we went down to comfort him, about 30 seconds later he puked up a hair ball (no pooping) and was totally fine and walked to his food dish and started eating and continued acting normal. We went about our night and went to bed. The next day we found him downstairs and he has passed away.
About 4 feet from where we found him there was the poop and some more puke. What could this be? I’m feeling upset and angry because he was checked out at the vet so many times for us to tell him he’s healthy and nothing wrong. I’m just looking for answers and I wish knew if there was something I could have done.

 

[Furballsmom]

Hello, even if the vet had provided a different diagnosis, there's no guarantee that any meds would have helped him, as it may have been his heart somehow, or overly constricted airways during the adrenaline rush, or .. .. .

You tried your absolute level best to do right by him, and he knew he was greatly loved.

RIP sweetheart

 

[FeebysOwner]

I am so sorry for what happened to Oscar. I agree with Furballsmom , there is no way to know. Physical exams and standard blood tests would not have necessarily shown anything amiss. All you could have done at that point was take a stab in the dark and start of series of non-typical testing which may or may not have identified a specific issue either.

I hope you can take consolation in knowing that you cared for him the best you could with so little to go on, and that you had each other's love for a long time, even if it was cut much shorter than you wanted. RIP little Oscar.

 

[Erin80]

Hi there,
I’m so sorry. This actually oddly enough happened to my black and white (in my pic) male cat Binx, he was only 4 years old.
A week and a half ago my 9 year old called me at work to tell me Binx’s legs seemed to have given out for a few seconds. She said it looked like he was trying to run but was on his belly and couldn’t get his legs up. This lasted for a few seconds, and then he meowed a loud meow that she said sounded like he was crying, got up and took off running to the basement. My 11 year old went down and consoled him. At the time I thought it sounded like a seizure. The next day he was totally fine, running around as usual, playing, eating….we figured it was a fluke. The following morning I went to let them out of their room (I have 3 cats and they go in their room at night), and Binx was dead in his bed. The way he was laying looked like he was sleeping when it happened as it was how he would lay when he was in a deep sleep. I was SHOCKED. I started to shake and called my husband who had gone to take the dog to the boarder as we were going away for the day.
Not knowing has been absolutely killing me. I have done a ton of reading and I really think he had feline cardiomyopathy. He had lost a bit of weight even though he was eating fine, and I was just starting to think about taking him to get checked out. Even if the heart problem had been discovered, from what I read he would have likely only survived 6-12 more months. I’m quite certain the collapse in his case was the sudden leg paralysis that can come along with the disease, and not a seizure.
I miss him every day.

 

[fionasmom]

I am very sorry for your loss of Oscar and agree that there is no way of knowing that anything might have changed the outcome. As was said, even diagnostics would have to have been more advanced to determine if anything was wrong.

I have lost two cats who had related seizure events. One had a heart murmur which the vet felt was insignificant. We let it go at that, but I began to notice that when I returned from work, small items around the house were knocked over. It all became clear one Saturday morning when he walked toward me lifting his front paws oddly, as if he could not feel them or they were painful, had a major seizure, and then died at my feet. He had been having seizures all along and I had never seen it happen and, as with Oscar, he seemed fine.

The other cat did not have a heart condition, had the seizure in front of me, and was at the ER in a matter of minutes. It ended up being an intracranial issue and he declined rapidly, despite our efforts which included a specialist, and we let him go.