It has been a rough three days.
Ladykitty, our ~twelve-year-old tabby, stopped eating. We took her in to see the vet Tuesday and had her looked at, and had some blood drawn.
The news is a bit grim. Ladykitty's in chronic renal failure. Her BUN is 224 (normal for cats is 15-34) and Creatinine is 15.9 (0.8-2.3). That's pretty damn high, and when I first heard the vet tell me the actual numbers, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.
I asked him what the options were at this point, and he suggested giving her lactated ringers 200cc subcutaneous every day. Luckily, I'm able to do that with her here at home rather than leaving her in the veterinary hospital. At least we can be with her, and she can be at home in familiar surroundings.
It's been about 24 hours since we started, and she really did perk up a lot after the first 200cc bolus. She is still much less active and spry than usual, but she comes out of her dark hiding places when we visit her, and seems to want company at least for a few minutes several times a day.
She has been making urine, so I don't think she can be in total kidney failure. To be sure, we set up the laptop in front of the room with the litter boxes and set up the webcam to snap a photo every 30 seconds. If I had to guess, she's making about 20-40cc's of clear/straw urine about every 6 hours. But she hasn't had any bm's since we've set up the monitoring system (but then again, she has not been eating since Saturday).
Our vet was quite honest about the fact that he doesn't often see a complete recovery with such bad renal labs, but he's "been surprised by more than a few older cats" that are able to turn around after 2-4 weeks of this fluid therapy, along with some Pepcid (5mg once a day). We're also giving her amoxicillin but her WBC is normal and doesn't have a fever, but I agreed with the vet that a run of antibiotics could be beneficial.
The vet said that he has a few patients, older cats, that have been supported even with chronic renal failure using subcutaneous fluid boluses for more than a year. Depending on Lady's quality of life, we'd easily be willing to do that.
The difficult times will come if she becomes very uncomfortable, or doesn't seem to be able to stand/walk/eliminate, or gets so sick she can't interact with us.
So we're under some pretty significant stress right now. As it is now, we still have hope, and thankfully, at least some time to ... oh god I can't even type the end of that sentence. Let's just leave it at Hope.