11yo cat fine thursday, end-stage renal failure by tuesday?
hi all. i have 11 year old female identical twin girls and a 4yo girl. this will probably be a wall of text, but please bear with me. not sure what to flair this as. not pet loss, i think, because she’s still with us now.
gemma (11yo) had labs done last month. i do not have a copy of those labs, but her vet told me that everything looked good at the time. they did not do a urine sample.
last thursday, gemma started acting a little odd. she didn’t sleep beside me that night, which is weird for her. on friday, she seemed like she was sleeping more than usual, but i brushed it off; the twins have a 4 year old “daughter” who loves to play a little too much, and sometimes she just tires them out. by saturday afternoon, i realized that something wasn’t right. she kept opening the closet door to sleep in there and wasn’t as social as usual. she is my velcro baby, but sometimes she just has an “off day”, but never two in a row. by nighttime, she had started meowing very loudly at me and didn’t sleep much, which struck me as weird. i decided to take her to the vet on monday. on sunday, she was mostly sleeping, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she was screaming at me, but still eating, drinking, and using the bathroom normally, no vomiting.
well, monday rolls around, and the soonest appointment the vet has is tuesday morning. i called both other vet offices in my area (semi-rural, not a lot of resources) and neither had an appointment open monday, so i settled for her normal vet at 9am, but with a different doctor at the practice (but same one as before, who did labs last month; regular vet is on paternity leave). not ideal, but i wanted her seen asap.
we go in this morning and basically, she has two infected premolars. we decide to do a blood test and a urine test under the impression that she will have surgery next monday to remove the infected teeth, as long as her labs come back good. he decided that her weird behavior likely because of dental pain. nothing else seems wrong with her, but i do tell the vet that she didn’t want to eat last night, and only pecked at her food this morning, and that she has stopped eating dry food entirely. we both chalk this up to pain because of her teeth. he gives her a dose of zorbium for pain and an injection of convenia to fight the infection before surgery. she also gets subcutaneous fluids, because she is dehydrated, but he doesn’t say much about it other than “maybe she isn’t drinking as much because of the dental pain”. we even talked about an appetite stimulant if she hasn’t eaten by noon tomorrow. he also says her very stinky breath is because of the infection; the stinky breath began about 2 weeks ago and got bad around thursday as well.
well, around 5pm, my entire world gets shattered. her labs came back early, and they show severe, advanced chronic kidney disease. he diagnoses her with end-stage renal failure. the vet himself admitted that he was shocked by these results and did not expect to see this from her. he advises that i take her to an emergency vet for overnight treatment and fluids. i get in the car and drive an hour to the nearest 24hr emergency hospital.
on the drive there, she starts to decline. she is very quiet, still, spacey/dazed, and her general vibe is completely wrong. at the emergency vet, she is taken in immediately and marked as “critical condition”. they start an iv catheter to give her fluids while we figure out what’s going on, and what to do. eventually, we were quoted $2500 for a single night in the hospital, with only monitoring and continuing fluids. the vet reviews her labs, palpates her kidneys (very small), and tells me to consider making a compassionate choice for gemma because she’s going downhill fast. i mention her bloodwork last month and how the vet said that it looked normal, and asked what happened between then and now; she tells me that she doesn’t have an answer, but gem has likely been suffering from this for some time now. i reiterate that she had quite literally zero symptoms of anything weird until thursday, and again, she tells me that she doesn’t have an answer.
unable to pay $2500 upfront, we decide to take her home for the night (and my family drove down immediately to say their goodbyes to her), and we’ll put her to sleep at our home vet tomorrow morning. at home, she seems to be in the same condition as she was at the second vet’s office. she is wobbly (started after a few hours of zorbium), laying down, and occasionally meowing at me, wanting me to hold her and cuddle her. she is not sleeping, only small naps. she is drinking water but still refuses food, and even refuses a chicken churu. i made a joke last week that feels kind of haunting now, saying that gem would have to be on death’s doorstep to turn down a chicken churu.
this is such a gut punch. my entire world has been turned upside down. this sweet girl is my baby, my whole life honestly. she is my velcro cat and my best friend. she is with me literally every single moment except for when i’m cooking (she tries to sit on the stove, so i have to put her in my room while it’s on). i consider myself to be an attentive cat mom, and my vet literally prided me on it when my late cat was going through diabetes, that i noticed small things that others wouldn’t. i have a lot of health anxiety and worry so much about my girls. they sneeze the wrong way and i’m worrying if they have a respiratory infection.
so, at the end of things, my question is: how in the world did this progress so fast? what happened? is there any way that i could have stopped this, or at least noticed it sooner? how did her labs look fine last month, and then come back w/ a creatinine of 9.3, bun 229, sdma 71, phosphorus 30?
TLDR: 11yo female cat is completely fine until thursday. slowly progresses into lethargy, not eating, and bloodwork/urine comes back insane. vet diagnoses her with end-stage renal failure. bloodwork last month “looked good”. what happened? does anyone have a similar experience?