One of our adopted strays, an 8-mo.-old ginger tabby, went in for her spaying last week, but after a few days managed to get her hood off, and apparently pulled her stitches out, and got the incision open, and the wound dirty. We rushed her to the vet, who cleaned and restitched her, and put the hood on more tightly, and gave her antibiotics last Friday.
I looked for the live yoghurt on the way home but couldn’t find it. On Sat. Ginger had the runs, and my better third ran out to find the yoghurt; brought it home and she wouldn’t drink it.
Today Ginger had the runs again; we tried mixing the yoghurt into her drinking water; no good. Then we tried mixing it with tuna, which worked; she loved it. But a couple hours later, the runs returned, with a vengeance – what had been very loose went pure watery. After a third exhausting cleanup of the resulting mess all over the apartment, I now have her locked in the tiled bathroom with some water, awaiting a visit to the vet first thing in the morning.
This may or may not be a helpful post. But, here goes…
How is the cat, other than having the runs? I mean, is it eating? Sounds like it is. Is it behaving otherwise normally? If so, I wouldn’t worry too much… probably just a temporary problem.
Yeah, ok otherwise; I’m pretty sure it’s a reaction to the antibiotics; and we’ll take her back in to the vet tomorrow morning as soon as they open, so everything should be ok. But I thought it would be useful to have a thread on diarrhea in cats; I’ve been googling for pages on this and found advice from vets on stuff like dosage of loperamide, and so on. After triple checking vet advice online for interactions, side effects, dosage, etc., I decided on giving her a tiny dose of loperamide to help get her through the night more comfortably while awaiting a trip to the vet.
SO she’s probably ok but since the other threads in Pets were on dogs, I thought I’d start one on cats with the runs, so we could have info for reference.
Actually we Googled in both English and Chinese to see what do do for diarrhea, and both of us found articles confirming the use of probiotic yoghurt, among other things, so our giving the cat the stuff was based on more than just Stray Dog’s tip. However, the diarrhea did get noticeably worse after we gave it to her. Then again, we gave it to her mixed with tuna, and it could just be that eating tuna when she already had diarrhea just made it worse. So it’s pretty hard to sort out the cause of the deterioration.
The loperamide dose, plus withdrawing food and waiting 10 hours seems to have helped. The vet had us stop giving the oral antibiotics, replacing it with an injected version, and adding an injected anti-diarrheal. So far so good. We’ll probably resume with her regular cat food tomorrow and see how it goes.
[quote=“TaiwanPsycho”]
Taught her to do this soon after. img.photobucket.com/albums/v714/ … toilet.jpg[/quote]Is your cat really trained to use the toilet? If it is, impressive! :bravo: I heard it can be done. I tried with my cats but it didn’t work. Would be nice not having to scoop the litter box.
That’s true, but don’t the probiotics in live yoghurt have the opposite effect? I’m not sure.
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Kind of yes. I didn’t read the OP’s post carefully enough. I thought he couldn’t find live yoghurt. If its live then in most cases the bacterias have already split the lactose, thus the cat doesn’t need the enzyme herself.
Tuna though is wellknown to cause problems if given too often. The general rule is that white meat is always ok. I don’t have a reference for this though, just my families experience from raising cats for decades.
Couldn’t find it at reasonable qty. & price on day 1; found it on day 2 and administered it mixed with a small amount of tuna; kitty’s always liked tuna and never had problems with digesting it. A couple hours later the diarrhea went from moderately bad to very bad. It could be that the condition just got worse on its own, hard to say. But a shot each of anti-diarrheal and anti-biotic meds stopped it on a dime Monday morning, and she seemed fine as of Tues. morning.
