Yesterday, before I went to the vet I wanted to make a forum where people could tell me that my over reactive brain was doing just that. Today I celebrated because my less than 5 month old kitten made it through the night. Yesterday when I walked into the kitten room I walked into a minefield of itty bitty throwups, after I cleaned up the 9 or so incidents that I found I figured that he just ate something bad and went to buy some cat grass. We brought the catgrass home but only our other kitten would eat it. So I left it alone, figuring he would eat it when he needed to. 10 minutes later I could hear the very notorious "kitten throwing up" noise. I ran into the room and watched my poor baby, Peanut, throw up white foamy bile. After witnessing such a terrible ordeal I knew it was vet time, now all the money that I have in the world right now is "supposed" to be going to bills but, you know, the baby comes first. I'd called all the vets in the area, all of which no longer take payment options, and found someone who didn't have the week booked solid. This vet wasn't our usual one but they were cheaper and they told me that if I could get him there in the next five minutes they could see him. We rushed to the vet and they proceeded to take him out of the box, put a paper collar on him, turn his name into "Peanuts" and take him into the back where they then told me it would take an hour for the vet to have time to look at him and they would give me a call when he had been. What? I even went the extra mile and waited an extra hour for them to call me before I demanded they give me my baby back. Our vet office, that lets me sit with him as he is waiting and then examined found extra time, in 45 minutes, to see him.

The initial visit didn't go well, I thought I would just get some stool softeners, maybe something to make him stop throwing up and be sent on my way. Instead I was informed that his intestines were bunching up and per usual circumstance he could have a string caught in there causing the intestines to bunch up like a hoodie when the sting is pulled. He talked about blood tests just in case his kidneys were going south, and then either x-rays or an ultrasound. Counting my pennies, we went with blood tests first and although my pocketbook was praying that it would be the kidneys my heart was praying for the string. I waited for a good 20 minutes on the results but the assistant wouldn't tell me until the vet could get in. She did imply it was a good thing that we did the tests. Then we were graced by the doctors presence. Peanut was dying of kidney failure and the outlook was low to grave. He still recommended the ultrasound to see if there was a treatable cause in his intestines to cause the failing. The 200$ in my wallet wasn't getting me that far and I asked if I could have the night to scrape together some cash.

After going to a payday advance loan place we scraped together the money to take him for his ultrasound, so that's where I am now, happy that Peanut survived the night at home and waiting expectantly for the veterinary office to open so I can take him in and find out if there is any way to save my babies life. I don't know what I need, I'm terrified, my eyes and jaw hurts so much from crying, family can only offer so much condolence and I still don't know if there is anything that I can do to help him live.

http://i58.tinypic.com/2q1e1pk.jpg

hugs! that is such a hard thing to go through. I'm so sorry. Kidney failure is treatable though so that's good. Hopefully the ultrasound will pull something up that will show you what the cause is. My mom has an older cat with kidney issues and while it's not curable there are ways to slow it down. And if it is an outside source (not just genetics or something) than may be it could be reversed. Watching a loved furbaby go through something like this is hard but you are doing everything you can so don't give up yet. Just give him lots of love and no matter what happens you are a good kitty momma!

Oh dear, it's been 2 weeks since you posted this and my heart totally goes out to you. You are indeed a very good kitty mom as said. I hope that Peanut pulled through. I haven't had a cat in 5 yrs for a bunch of reasons, but before that I hadn't lived w/out a cat for over 17 yrs and I know what it means to be a kitty mom, especially since I'm 59 and I never was blessed with human children.

I can't imagine going through what you did. I HAVE lost 3 cats, but 2 were old and it was their time. The third one, unfortunately got out of the apt and refused to come back, he was just born wild.

But I DO know how dedicated those of us who are cat lovers are to our babies and they ARE babies to us, no matter what their age. I'm so very very sorry that you went through this and I can't believe that more ppl did not respond to your topic. There are SO many cat lovers here in subeta. I just don't understand. I looked at his photo and what a cutie. I truly hope that they were able to treat him. I never had any money for anything so if one of my cats had had anything seriously wrong I wouldn't have been able to get tests, etc. I'm on a very low fixed income.

Oh dear, it just occurred to me that perhaps nobody came back to this post because you didn't come back, and maybe that means that the news was the worst. I hope not, and hope that my post isn't upsetting. I have only caring in my heart for you in having to deal with this regardless of the outcome. ❤

I don't know a lot of people on Subeta, I'm sure me not knowing them and they not knowing me is some of the reason for the lack of response. Thats ok though, all I needed was for Peanut to get better.

It was the weirdest thing, I admitted him to the vet at 7 in the morning, an hour before they opened their doors and waited untill noon for them to call and tell me the results of his ultrasound, when they did I was told that he had 2 kidneys, they were both fully functioning and fine. The vet didn't know what was wrong with them, he just said something had caused them to stop working and it was financially in my best interests to take him home and admit the same solution they would at the vets. So I ran over to the clinic to learn how to give him his shots, which was me pulling the scruff of his neck up until it resembled a tent and sticking a needle into a pocket it created, not fun, and it left a huge bubble of liquid just right under his skin just to keep him hydrated. I ended up picking up 300$ at the cash advance place and my bill came up at 299$ :) The day afterwards, he was running around playing with his brother Slade and acting just like normal, they would call me every other day to see if he was still doing well and all that I could say was, "yes he's doing fine, eating and drinking on his own and he hasn't thrown up once" I doubt they thought that it would turn out that well. I guess we wont ever know what caused it or why he got suddenly better but I'm soooo grateful that he did :)

Thank you both so much for your concern :) and here he is after his ultrasound with his little bald belly. Thank you both so much for your concern, it means a lot to me :)

oh my gosh, that little belly is too adorable! I'm so glad he's okay! :D It's a kitteh miracle :)

I'm so happy for you and Peanut! You are a strong person, I don't know if I could have handled the situation as you did. Peanut is such a cutie <3 He looks a lot better in the 2nd picture ^^

You're VERY welcome and thank YOU for letting me know that he pulled through. I'm very interested in medical things (anatomy, physiology, etc) and I used to work as a medical claims processor. So when you say that you "don't know why he suddenly got better," I have a couple of theories. To begin with, it seems premature (of the vet) to say he was dying of kidney failure. I mean, IF he had been dying I would think he would have. That bugs me that they seemed to have "jumped the gun" in telling you that. I think it would have been more accurate to say that he COULD die of kidney failure if his intestines didn't straighten out, and they obviously DID straighten out and started to function normally if he stopped throwing up and got better.

The reason I say that is that my mother had a bowel obstruction--in her small intestines, which is probably where your kitty had his cause I'm fairly certain that the large intestines are too big to get bunched up, even in a cat since everything is relative. So my mom was 78 and she was vomiting for 4 days (and she WAS admitted to the hospital right away) but they didn't know what was causing it. She couldn't keep the "contrast" down so that they could get a good picture of it on the ultra sound. With a bowel obstruction the best thing is if it's only "bunched up" or folded over, and the worst is if it's being obstructed by a tumor or something is impacted in there.

So fortunately there was an excellent surgeon available--who happened to be a woman, and I'm glad because sometimes I think that women are smarter than men because we have intuition that many men don't have which adds to our intelligence in a way that men can be clueless about. My point is that this surgeon said to my mom that she needed to go into surgery immediately, and it was less than 24 hrs after she first saw my mom. Four days sounds long, but she got sick late on a Friday night, so there was some delay with it being a weekend, but in reality they probably should have had her in surgery on Sunday, especially because of her advanced age.

My point is that as soon as this woman saw my mom and once she realized that they were NOT going to be able to see it on ultra sound, she knew there was no time to waste.

So the surgeon was brilliant and she got my mom into surgery immediately and they didn't even have to cut into her intestines to see what was wrong. As soon as they were "in" they could clearly see that it was folded over, so the doctor simply unfolded it and observed long enough to see that it "pinked up" with blood flow and then they were able to "close" so my mom didn't have to endure a much worse surgery. If they had needed to cut into her intestine to see what was wrong it majorly increases risks (risk of infection and all sorts of things) so she still had to heal from having surgery on her abdomen, but that was considered the best case scenario.

Anyway, I hope that wasn't TMI, but I thought you might like to know that (IMHO) your kitty probably had a kink in his intestines that simply straightened itself out and he regained his health. I'm not trying to downplay how sick he was or invalidate anything you said. He was definitely in danger there and very sick. I just get bugged by the way that some docs and vets say things to ppl and don't explain it well and you end up being more scared than you should have.

My reason for saying this is that you asked to begin with if your brain was being over reactive and I'm attempting to validate you and say that I don't think that your brain WAS over reacting, but I wonder if maybe you might have felt better if you hadn't been given the worst possible news w/out a better explanation. It seems that they delivered the worst news prematurely. I'm not sure you would've been as upset if someone had communicated with you better. I think that good communication is becoming a lost art in our society. Everyone is in too much of a hurry, and people don't seem to explain things well enough to prevent others from freaking out as you were.

I hope that makes sense. I know that I freak out over many things, and I have for a long time, and some of that IS just me being over anxious etc...but people don't really seem to be sensitive enough for MY needs, and I've always been criticized for being overly sensitive, when in fact if anyone had just comforted me more when I was young (instead of yelling at me) I think that my over sensitivity might have evolved into me being a much more creative and productive person, as opposed to being a neurotic mess.

Bottom line is that I'm projecting my own experiences into what happened to you, which means that my opinions might be totally "off" and not at all applicable. I DO think, however, that I am graced with a fair amount of wisdom and logic. I hope something that I said here helps. :) And I am SO glad that Peanut is better!! He's very very cute indeed and it's SO cool that you were able to get (adopt?) both him AND his brother when you made them members of your family. I think that most cats really need a member of their tribe to be as happy as they can be. I never had the opportunity to have sibling cats, that is SO wonderful. :)

It took me "forever" to type this (and edit out all my tangents) and when I went to another tab to do something else for a moment I discovered they announced the beginning of Morostide, about a half hr ago, but the Pumpkin Patch is not open yet. The news alluded to it as if there's some reason that it's not quite ready. Probably something to do with programming.

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