Friday, March 23, 2007

Friday Cat Food Blogging


NB_VenCatBagsth, originally uploaded by Mnemosyne_LA.

Let me tell you about Boris, who we love dearly, but who has been referred to as "The Pukenator" since he was very young.

A couple of months ago, the puking got abruptly worse. Instead of vomiting once or twice a month, he was throwing up three times a day. I got worried enough over a weekend that I insisted that we bring him in to the (incredibly expensive) emergency room at Animal Specialty Group. He was dehydrated enough that he ended up spending one night there and one night at our regular vet's office before we were able to bring him home.

But he kept puking. So we took him back to the vet and spent another $1,000 getting him an endoscopy to see what was wrong. Turns out Boris has feline inflammatory bowel disease, which is more of an annoyance than anything else unless it goes to long, in which case it can turn into cancer. Which freaked us the fuck out, because Natasha died of cancer only a year ago.

There really isn't any reliable treatment for it, other than putting the cat on steroids. The vet suggested that we might want to consider putting him on a "novel protein," basically a form of protein that he wouldn't have encountered before so he wouldn't have an allergy to it.

We were putting it off, but then we found out that Science Diet (which was what he was getting) was one of the brands that had been recalled. Yes, he was getting the hard food, and only canned food was being recalled, but it finally made it worth it to me to switch him to a new food.

It seems to be going okay -- he's definitely enthusiastic about the change, which may be why he threw up a little bit this morning. But we'll give him some fluids tonight and keep going on the switch.

So if you ever wondered what Dick Van Patten has been doing with his life lately, I can tell you: he's making cat food for cats with allergies.

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