Trying to determine the best path forward for our kitty, and if her symptoms still seem treatable
Hi everyone, my sweet girl Mindy is currently 12 years old. She is an indoor cat. We're trying to decide our best path forward.
For a few years she has had problems with her tummy and her poop. She can't have any human food, otherwise she throws up almost immediately, and repeatedly, even an errant piece of shredded cheese dropped by one of my kids. She also couldn't have certain wet foods we tried, she would throw those up too. For her poop, it's usually pretty loose, like a paste (she hasn't had a solid log in *years*), and sometimes she would go outside her litterbox. We've gone back and forth to the vet and tried a variety of steroids and vitamin shots to firm it up and usually they don't help a lot, but sometimes afterwards she would have periods of using the litterbox normally. So we kind of went on like this for a while, cleaning up outside when we needed. We tried new food, new litter boxes, new litter types, more/less amounts of litter in the box, more boxes, cleaning it more throughout the day, three different anti-anxiety medications, etc. She pees in the box just fine, but poop is not always consistent.
Anyway, about a month ago she started exclusively pooping outside the litterbox, and also it was much runnier than usual. We took her to the vet and she concluded that the issue is not behavioral as we might have thought, but medical. She got new food, which was "the blandest we can get," paired with a probiotic. But that made her poop very yellow and watery, and she stopped eating as much. If I picked her up, poop would leak out of her. We took her back to the vet to get X-rays and ultrasounds, and they found a lot of inflammation in her intestines, liver, and pancreas, but no obvious cause (they couldn't find a tumor, but that might be because she was so inflamed). Blood tests and stool tests (we've tested her stool like, four times this year) didn't indicate anything other than the inflammation. They could *not* rule out cancer though - it was either IBD or cancer. I don't know the extent of the blood tests but they sent stool samples for more thorough screening and didn't find anything.
She stayed overnight four weekends ago at the vet and they gave her medicine to "flush her out" and anti-inflammatory steroids, and tried a new food type. Luckily that firmed her poop up, we took her home and she was having somewhat normal poop every other day. But after about a week and a half, she started having loose poop again, outside the litterbox. She even doesn't hide it anymore, she would just stop walking and poop right where she was standing. We took her back to the vet again, they gave her another steroid shot and sent home liquid steroids. We tried the dry food version of the prescription wet food she had too.
It's been about two weeks now like this, her poop is not getting better, and she's pooping more than usual without eating more (maybe she's not absorbing it). Yesterday over the course of the day she pooped *seven times* around the house in pretty large piles. She's lost about a pound over the course of the month. But she's still acting normal, otherwise. She's still mobile and social, she doesn't have trouble jumping up to chairs or couches or laps. She does seem a bit uncomfortable when she sits on my lap now, or when I pick her up which she used to tolerate, but I might just be looking closer than before for signs. Some days I think she might be hiding from us but again, might just be looking for signs. Recently I have noticed at periods when she is resting, her breathing can get up to 30 or 40 breaths per minute (I can see her haunches go in and out) but it's not heavy breathing or panting, just shallow. And it doesn't last for too long, I check a bit later and it's slower. When we took her home from the vet weeks ago they noted that she had started doing that, but said that it was probably fluid in her lungs as a side effect of the medication/fluids they were giving her in her IV and that it should clear up in a day or two (which it largely did, but I'm noticing it again).
At this point, the vet said basically the only thing left to do, without doing a very expensive MRI to see if there's cancer, is to try a different food and/or more steroids. But to this point steroids aren't helping much (unless it was the large amount of steroids they gave her over the weekend which they suspect could have been what caused it to firm up for the week after she came home) and the new food last time made her much worse. They say her symptoms point more to cancer than IBD but they can't be sure.
TLDR:
I don't really want to spend >half an hour using a wet vac on the floor every day, as I have been. I have three young kids, and she has pooped on or near their toys on occasion. I know cats don't really show discomfort much until it's really bad (our other cat died last year from pancreatic cancer and didn't show major outward behavioral symptoms until two days before he ultimately died, right before we could take him to put him down). But at the same time I feel extremely guilty about putting her down, especially if it's something that isn't fatal on its own or *could maybe* be fixed.
I don't know what to do. She's the sweetest cat I've ever met, she sleeps on my chest almost every night, she's so good with the kids. But I don't know how long we can deal with this, it's a big struggle. I don't *wish* she would act sick but her giving a sign would be so helpful for our decision. For now we're keeping her around barring any really bad diarrhea but it's getting difficult. This morning we had two giant piles to clean right in the middle of the living area and we find dribbles of poop around the house too.
I'm sorry that's so long but I wanted to give a full picture to show how much we've tried to help her. I really just want another opinion on if this is a situation that looks like it could get better. Thank you!