u/Amanda_Jacks

My cat is 14, and a little while ago I started noticing she was drinking more water than usual.

She seemed totally fine otherwise. Still eating normally, still acting like herself, nothing that felt dramatic or urgent. If I hadn't been paying attention, I probably would've brushed it off.

What made me take it seriously was that I remembered seeing a post on Reddit before about older cats drinking more and kidney disease. That stuck with me enough that I decided to make a vet appointment instead of waiting.

They ran bloodwork, and it turned out she does have early kidney disease.

I'm really glad I didn't ignore it, because if I had waited for something more obvious, I think we would've caught it a lot later. The extra drinking was the first thing that felt different, and it was subtle enough that I could've easily talked myself out of it.

It really made me realize how important those slow day-to-day changes are with senior cats. If I hadn't noticed her water intake changing, I don't know how much longer it would've taken me to realize something was off.

Has anyone else caught a health issue in a senior cat because of a really small habit change first?

My cat is 14 and has always been healthy for her age. I took her for bloodwork every six months, fed her well, she seemed fine.

A few months ago I got curious about how much water she was actually drinking. Not for any medical reason — I'd just seen someone mention that changes in water intake can be an early signal for kidney issues in older cats, and I wanted a baseline.

So I started measuring. Filled her bowl to the same line every morning, checked it at night, accounted for evaporation by putting out a control bowl she couldn't reach. Very DIY.

First two weeks, she was drinking about 150ml a day. Consistent.

Then over the next month it crept up. 170. 190. By week 6 it was around 220ml pretty reliably.

She seemed completely normal otherwise. Same appetite, same energy level, same litter box output (or so I thought — turns out she was urinating slightly more frequently but the clumps were spread out so it wasn't obvious).

Brought the data to my vet. Ran bloodwork. Early stage kidney disease. Caught it early enough to manage with diet changes and monitoring. My vet said if we'd waited for obvious symptoms — weight loss, lethargy, vomiting — we'd be looking at a much more advanced stage.

The change was about 45% over six weeks. Gradual enough that I never would have noticed by just glancing at her bowl.

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