Today is Day 3 at the clinic. My husband and I reached there at around 10am. Cleo had urinated a lot and also defecated a small bit in the litter box.
Cleo certainly looked “fine”, but alas, this is not reflected in any of the blood test results.
I finger-fed her some wet food (Hill’s KD) though she didn’t want to eat on her own today. Her vet assistants gave her her medicines.
Some blood was drawn for testing today.
The hope was that if her creatinine reading decreased significantly, Cleo can come home. Judging from her demeanour, I actually thought she would be able to come home today.
Unfortunately, that was far from the reality.
Cleo’s creatinine level did drop, but not significantly at all. Being on IV-drips, it should have dropped a lot, but the drop was only from 714 on Thursday to 630 today. This isn’t a significant drop. Her urea did drop from 30.2 to 24.2, though.
But the most drastic drop was her PCV. From 17% on Thursday to just a shocking 10% today. The vet explained that the 17% that day could have been due to dehydration (hence, the blood was more concentrated, perhaps even that day, it was just 13%-15%) and it has dropped further today. Cleo was given Darbepoetin on Thursday, but the drug needs 3-5 days to work. So we don’t know if it would work yet. With Darbepoetin, in some cats, it just simply does not work at all. It did not work for Cleo, Bunny or Hiro.
The vet explained that the elevated kidney readings is possibly due to three factors: (1) the chronic kidney disease itself, (2) the GI bleeding on Thursday which led to reabsorption of the blood by the body (the body thinks it is food), hence it elevates the creatinine, and (3) the hypertension which isn’t controlled by the Amlodipine or the Semintra. Both drugs don’t seem to be working on Cleo.
The vet also thinks it is lymphoma in the kidneys and this is causing the fast deterioration.
In short, sadly, Cleo’s prognosis is poor.
There is, however, one last hope, but it is just a glimmer of hope and that is to do an ear-prick blood test to see if there are any signs of new red blood cells. If there are, it would give us a glimmer of hope that the Darbepoetin is beginning to work. Before the effect can be measured by the PCV, new red blood cells should show up in the ear-prick blood test. We are going to do this this evening.
Apart from that, Cleo can be given blood supplements too.
But the prognosis remains poor as the kidneys are deteriorating very rapidly.
There isn’t anymore we can do except to keep Cleo as comfortable as we can.
Cleo needs to still remain on the IV-drip for hydration and for medicines to be administered intravenously. She is already so difficult to feed by mouth all this while. IV-drugs would take effect faster than oral drugs.
I will be visiting again this evening.
The priority is to keep Cleo as comfortable as possible.
I have accepted that the prognosis is poor. I understand that no one escapes from sickness, old age and death. This is a grim reminder that this is life. We are all born to die. But in between these two events, let’s do as much good as we can to bring some happiness to others. Our animals certainly fulfil this mission in their lives – they bring us so much happiness by just being who they are, without any pretense.
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