Re: 2/17 Enana AMPS 341
Getting on my soap box LOL:
Be very careful with your other cat. A cat needs to continue eating well and any weight loss should be tracked and managed carefully. Do you have a baby scale or a petscale or a postage scale that weighs to the ounce?
A cat can quickly get Feline Hepatic Lipidosis - fatty liver. This can be fatal. But it is more often seen in overweight cats. When they don't get enough calories their livers don't process fat like ours do. It actually starts clogging. So you want to be aware of how much your cats are eating and how quickly they are losing weight. You want to be in control of this completely, not at the mercy of the cat if they aren't eating enough due to diet changes for example.
FHL is kind of like a cycle. Once the liver starts feeling it, they eat less, the liver feels it more, they start feeling yucky and often go completely anorexic as the liver gets worse and they feel horribly nauseated from this also.
What happened with Maverick? We were told Maverick needed to lose weight so we put him on a lower calorie senior food. What I didn't realize in hindsite was all of the signs were there and I missed them. And of course no vet had ever told us about FHL. His litterbox was "cleaner" than normal. I didn't realize he wasn't eating after a while because the dog was eating all the evidence. It was only when he started vomiting that I realized there was a problem. I didn't take him into the vet right away either. I spent another week trying to get his appetite back up with endless foods (tuna, chicken, wet, dry etc). I thought a few licks were okay. He was so sick when we picked him up from the vet. His liver was failing and he was yellow like a banana from jaundice. He had to get a feeding tube to get the calories into him to help his liver recover.
So you have to do food transitions very carefully. With Maverick - switching him to wet food really was a nightmare, but we knew about syringe feeding and got his blood work done often to make sure his liver was handling the resulting weight loss. We don't want anyone to have to deal with FHL.
