This post is part of our “Journey to Raw” series, published on Wednesdays, and comes to you from Pamela Perrine, a 60 year old advocate for natural living and volunteer health coach who dabbles in gardening and photography and hikes the Smokies. 

We already had 3 cats when my daughter found Baby, the morning after a devastating ice storm in 1999. She was about 8 months old, just a little more than skin and bones. Coal black and soft as velvet. Absolute sweetness! She loved to eat, to snuggle, to play ~ then she was ready to eat again. And again! Before long she was sleek and shiny, with tons of energy.

By the time she was 2 I noticed some odd behavior in the litter box. We’d never had a cat with any health problems before so I didn’t recognize what was happening. Once I realized she was straining and having difficulty urinating I took her right to the vet. She received the conventional care and got better….for a few months. After this cycle repeated itself a few times the vet ‘put her on’ a prescription diet of Hills Science dry kibble even though he felt that the Purina One we were feeding her was fine.

It became evident that the prescription food wasn’t helping when I saw her urinate and it was tinged red!!!! She had cried while in the box, jumped out and ran off like something awful was chasing her. I took her to a holistic vet up in Nashville, but that treatment didn’t help either. Baby continued to pee blood off and on – and I began to hold my breath every time I heard someone scratching in the litter box. For a while it seemed that much of my life centered around that sound….I would run and see if it was Baby and how she was doing. It got to the point that she refused to go in any of the litter boxes, and I’d find her squatting over the tub drain or in a quiet corner. We spent lots of time sitting in waiting rooms, me trying to stay calm so I wouldn’t upset my precious kitty any more than necessary. We tried another vet, got more antibiotics; switched her to the canned Science Diet, but she was getting cystitis more often, not less.

She’d lay in my lap and tremble with pain. I tried T-Touch and massage and pressure point massage; we spent hundreds of dollars on treatments from various vets. But nothing helped and I was getting desperate to find her some long term relief.

Then one morning I found a trail of drops and splashes of fresh blood on a white coverlet. Back to the vet. I don’t remember his words but I remember the feeling of despair because he pretty much said that there was nothing more he could do to help her, but sent us home with more antibiotics. She stopped peeing blood but was obviously depressed and anxious all the time. That is NO way to live!

A few weeks later I saw some cans of PetGuard cat food in a health food store, and bought three. I think they cost $1.50 for 14 oz back then, but Baby had been losing weight and I hoped something wet might encourage her to eat more.
She LOVED it! She ate with gusto and the other kitties insisted on having some as well. I went back for more the next day. By the third day I realized that Baby was using the litter box normally…..and seemed more calm and content. After a week of good canned food she was acting like she had before this awful cycle of UTI had begun. I pitched all the Science Diet in the trash!

Baby didn’t have another bout of cystitis for 9 years.

But in early 2006 she had her first encounter of ‘miliary dermatitis’…..a benign sounding name for a very insidious disease. She would get little scabs that itched so bad they made her skin look like it was creeping up her back. The first year it took 6 weeks to get them cleared up using the vet’s treatment (antibiotics and an itch cream). About a year later it came back, stayed longer, and this time she pulled out so much hair that she’d throw up huge hairballs every couple days and was losing weight. When we conquered that one I breathed a sigh of relief – the episode had lasted at least 2 months and wore us both out!

Long story short….about every 6 months Baby would have a flare up of miliary dermatitis, and each one lasted longer and spread over more of her body. The vet was sure it was caused by flea bites, claiming that a single flea bite could cause hundreds of scabs. By now I was keeping Baby inside, and seldom found a flea on her. Twice a day I flea combed her, used DE on her bedding and resting areas, scatter rugs, under furniture and cushions; vacuumed the one 8 x 10 rug daily. There was no flea dirt, no evidence of fleas, but still she would get covered with thousands of scabs.

In 2008, we tried yet another vet – I was about to grab her and walk out after he’d jabbed her neck for the 5th time, trying to get a blood sample. But he got it on that 5th try and called me with the results the next day – her values were perfect, like always. He recommended a tricyclic antidepressant for behavior modification “just in case”…..and admitted that it would most likely cause her to be drowsy, dizzy and sleep a lot. NOT for this kitty! She loved high places and getting dizzy while on the log beams of our house was NOT an option. Plus, depression was a side effect of her illness, not the CAUSE.

We drove 90 minutes every week for acupuncture treatments till the lovely vet there suggested we try something else, as the treatments weren’t helping. I tried all sorts of herbs and supplements for dermatitis, but no help.

By 2011 it had gotten so bad that the only humane thing to do was for her to get shots of Depo-Medera every 6 weeks during the bouts of dermatitis. Yes, the steroids stopped the scabs – but they cause liver damage. I tried to spread the shots as far apart as possible, and by September 2012 she’d only had 11. In October her inky black coat began to turn seal brown. Her stools became pale tan, she lost weight…..in a daze I took her back to a vet, fearing the worst. Her liver enzymes were sky high. Dr K admitted that there wasn’t much he could do for a 13 yr old cat with liver failure. He suggested that I use a pain med to keep her comfortable till I was “ready” to put her out of her misery. I’m crying as I type this….even after 4 years the memory of that time still hurts.

This is the kitty who follows me around. She sits on the desk when I’m at the computer and snags my hand so that I’ll pet her. She runs around the bed in anticipation when it’s time to go to sleep and insists on sleeping on me. Her nickname is Squeaky Toy because she has a squeaky little voice that goes up in volume if I dare to ignore her first requests. I love this little girl and can’t imagine life without her.

Thankfully, I’ve used holistic medicine on my family and pets for many years. While nothing had helped the dermatitis, I knew what to do for a liver problem and it worked. She regained her color and some weight and her stools normalized. WooHoo! The vet couldn’t believe the difference in just 2 months. At the end of December a few scabs appeared and back we went to the vet. Dr K insisted that it was those dreaded fleas, even though she had no fleas nor a single speck of flea dirt. He insisted that Comfortis was the ONLY thing that would help. I’d refused flea treatments thus far so I figured perhaps I was being unreasonable. I gave her the pill. That DAMN Pill!

The morning of the 3rd day after giving her the Comfortis there was something terribly wrong. She was listless, her coat dull, no spark in her eyes. She gets so upset driving to the vet and I wanted to wait to make sure there was a need to go before I stressed her with the trip. I stayed close to the house all day. That night she was trembling and quivering in pain. I slept in a chaise so that she was on my lap, holding her all night long. Neither of us got much rest. Through the next morning she stayed on her cat tree in the sunlight. Her front leg was dangling off and it was trembling. My husband was out of town so I had to take care of the farm animals before I could take her to the vet. But when I called they were handling a couple of emergency surgeries and were backed up, and they informed me that ‘tomorrow’ was the earliest they could ‘squeeze her in’! Arrgghh!

By 3 pm I gave up and admitted that I needed to do what was best for my Best Friend. She was obviously suffering and it was so unfair of me to want her to continue to live just so that I could have my little buddy with me. The UPS truck pulled up just as I had picked up the phone to call the mobile vet to come euthanize Baby the next morning. I was sobbing so hard I put the phone down, glad for a momentary reprieve. HalleluYah, it was the medicine I had ordered a few days previously.

In desperation 3 days earlier, I had gone thru every holistic animal care book I have and searched the internet for help. The answer was right there in Dr Pitcairns book, Natural Health for Dogs and Cats…..he linked skin issues to kidney problems. And stated that by the time blood work shows any sort of kidney problem, the kitties have lost about 75% of their kidney function. So I had ordered some things from PetWellBeing.com.

I immediately gave Baby a dose of the KidneySupport Gold and the Nu Pet granular antioxidant. Surprisingly she took them both with no problem. I sat back down with her on my lap and watched some stuff on Youtube till I couldn’t stay awake any longer, than gave her another dose of each. When I woke up during the night I realized that she was no longer trembling, but in a deep sleep. I had to go potty sooooo bad but I wasn’t about to disturb her!!!!! The next morning we both woke up with the sun and she looked at me and blinked!! No trembling. No pinched look on her little elfin face.

We began the day with another dose of both meds. She climbed onto her favorite sunny spot on the cat tree, and laid there with her leg dangling off…..NO trembling at all!

A few days later, I realized that she was watching our puppy eat his raw food dinner with great interest. I cut up a few pieces for her and – surprise, surprise – she gobbled them right up. I’d tried giving our 5 cats raw venison in the past but only the 2 males would eat it. At this time we only had 2 girls left, Baby and Punkin, who was a year older. I read up on raw feeding for kitties and decided to go for it. Both girls took to it right away, although they still wanted some of the canned holistic that they were used to.

It took 2 months to transition them from the quality canned food onto all raw. But the benefits were immediate and dramatic!

Punkin would shed huge amounts of hair all year long – wherever she sat or slept there was always a halo of hair no matter how much I brushed. Her back had been injured before we found her in 2006 and caused severe constipation which no conventional vet treatments had helped (including enemas). Suddenly Punkin was pooping most every day, and lost very little hair, even when brushed.

Baby went from 6# up to 8#, and regained her joi de vive (joy of life) big time! She is now 17 (equivalent to 85 in human years) and runs, jumps, plays like she did when she was 10 years old. She loves to spend time outside on a harness; and the little red light from a laser pointer is the Call of the Wild. She makes sure I know when it’s feeding time – she’s better than an alarm clock and often tries to convince me to go ahead and feed her an hour early. Or two!

Every aspect of her life and health that was adversely affected by the vet treatments has been rectified, it seems. I added digestive enzymes to her food to overcome constipation; and antioxidants, because they are so beneficial. She is still too thin…. but far better off than she was 4 years ago.

Just now she patted my leg…..”Hey, Mom! It’s past my 4 o’clock feeding! C’mon already!”

After dinner we’ll go outside for at least 30 minutes so she can feel the earth under her paws.

Oh….another leg pat! “Moooommmmm. I’m hungry!”

My motto has always been, “anything worth doing is worth doing right”! And that includes caring for those critters that are dependent on us. They give us their all……so I think that they deserve the best that we can provide for them.

Gotta go…..I just got the third pat-down. It’s chow time!

~Pamela

If you feed your kitties a raw diet and would like to see your story featured here, please contact me or leave a comment below.

And if you‘re interested in giving raw a try, check out our Raw Feeding and Transitioning Your Cat to Raw sections, and join the CatCentric group for help and support during your transition.

 

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