Sick but on the mend

Not too long ago we noticed some worrying changes and behaviours in Cleo. She gets that much of our attention that it's not difficult to notice even the smallest of things and what we'd noticed was anything but small. With this cat meaning so much to us we weren't about to take any chances and booked her straight into the vet. A couple days later we had our answers.

Cleo has hyperthyroidism, something the blood tests revealed quite conclusively, and left untreated will cause her demise which, of course, we won't allow to happen. It can cause retinal detachment and permanent blindness and, of course, kidney failure and death which is the way it goes if left untreated.

There were several treatments to choose from, one of which, radioactive iodine therapy, would prove quite traumatic and would require her to have stayed in the vets clinic for a couple of weeks which, for a cat like Cleo, we would not put her through. Not only does she fret when away from us, she's classed as a middle aged cat at 13 years old and it would have caused her a lot of stress. We opted for a less traumatic treatment.

Just under a week later the medicine arrived, a cream that was made by a compounding chemist and shipped to the vet, and we have been administering it each morning since, and will have to administer it for the rest of her life. It's rubbed into the inside of her ear, alternating ears each morning, and is absorbed into her system through the skin. The improvement is remarkable and she's begun to put on weight again and act normally. She'd lost half a kilogram in a very short period of time and for a cat her size that's a huge and dangerous amount of weight to lose. She's on the mend though.

We were so worried, another thing to worry about in our busy and complicated lives, but things have levelled out now and are moving in the right direction. We know we'll lose her eventually, but we will always do everything in our power to hold that off so we have time to spend with Cleo, a cat that makes us so happy.