Feline Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Feline inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic condition similar to Crohn's disease or celiac in humans. It has no known cause and no known cure. I started this blog to help document Fafnir's condition, as we have to carefully manage it for the rest of his life.
We suspected IBD, but were hoping it was a temporary food allergy, or maybe just irritable bowel syndrome. After a year of ups and downs and experimenting with Fafnir's diet, we scheduled an ultrasound. The ultrasound showed thickening of the bowels as well as damage to the ileum and a buildup of fluid near the spleen and liver.
The vet suspects either feline eosinophilic inflammatory bowel disease or lymphoma (cancer). The only way to tell for certain which one it is would be to do exploratory surgery and take a variety of biopsies. Because the treatment for both conditions is nearly identical, we have decided to forgo the invasive procedures and simply treat him instead.
He is currently on prednisolone (an anti inflammatory corticosteroid) twice a day and leukeran (a cat chemo drug that also has anti inflammatory properties) every four days. Since his ileum has taken the worst damage, we're also giving him vitamin B12 injections (cobalamin) twice a week. We also have appetite stimulant tablets to use as needed, but for now he appears to be somewhat interested in food and water, even if he's not consuming very many calories.
Every three weeks we'll need to bring him in for a complete blood count (CBC) to keep an eye on his white cell levels.
His vomiting stopped when we took fish (ironically, his favorite food) out of his diet. We're being very careful to keep him away from people food (he's sneaky about breaking into the butter), houseplants (he likes eating dead leaves), and have also moved his food/litter stations around to keep his food and water from getting contaminated with litter (he can kick litter clear across the room if he wants to).
We also have a baby scale that's accurate up to 0.5 ounces arriving in the mail today. We've been keeping an eye on his weight via our home scale (weigh yourself with the cat; weigh yourself without the cat; calculate the difference) for the past nine months, but a) it's supposedly only accurate to 0.2 pounds; and b) it doesn't seem very consistent. It's fine for monitoring human weight loss or weight gain but it's not sensitive enough to monitor the kitties.
The good news is that his symptoms don't appear to involve abdominal pain. He mostly looks lethargic and slightly nauseous, though thankfully he's stopped throwing up. His stomach also gurgles really loudly, but again, this has decreased significantly since removing fish from his diet.
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