 Purred: Mon Feb 11, '13 2:05am PST |
 | |  | | [UPDATED 3/13/13]
Here's an update:
We sent out an expensive fecal test to a lab that tests for everything. I just got the call from the vet with the results. As it turns out, Cleo has an overgrowth of clostridium and, very unfortunately, she contracted feline coronavirus. We are unsure of if it has mutated to FIP (which is always fatal) as I won't have time to take her to the vet until next week, but in the meantime the vet prescribed some sort of foul tasting diarrhea antibiotic capsules.
I am not sure how to proceed with the news of the coronavirus. I'm really scared for Cleo, and I'm terrified that all we can do is "cross our fingers". I'll probably be making a new post at some point once we have a checkup with the vet, but for now I have to thank you guys with all your help. If you have any stories or suggestions about feline coridium or coronavirus, please don't hesitate to post. I'm still all ears!
[Original Post]
Sorry for the length but I want to be as thorough as possible because you guys are a wealth of ideas and information.
A little background info:
Around September, I found a kitten in a parking lot cold and covered in fleas. I took her in and now she is my only cat, Cleo. She is on Revolution, tested negative for FIV/FLV, up to date on all shots, dewormed, and was overall a very healthy cat with awesome poop. Cleo is also exclusively an indoor cat, she has never seen the outdoors outside of a carrier since I rescued her because I live in an apartment complex.
Then a couple months ago we took her in to get spayed and she had a turbulent recovery; she began to show signs of loose stool and diarrhea, but we chalked it up to her coming off of whatever the doc gave her.
However, she has never recovered from her loose, smelly stools. She has been dewormed 3 more times since the spay; the first time was from a mobile vet and I believed it was worms at the time, so I had her dewormed. Her foul stools returned and I tried changing her diet to no avail, and scheduled an appointment with the vet that had performed her spay and brought a stool sample. They found tapeworms (again! I had already treated her for tapeworms before the spay because I found the tell-tale sesame seeds in my bed) and gave her a shot dewormer with a followup shot 4 weeks later.
In between the two shots I fed her 1-2 tablespoons of canned pumpkin a day to firm up her stools for my own sanity because I was tired of dealing with sludge and poopy paws. It worked fairly well for a while.
Here is the part that really, really worries me:
The vet gave me 10 pouches of Purina FortiFlora probiotics to add to her food, and I stopped feeding it to her because it seemed to make her stools worse. I was still waiting for the tapeworm shot to "work" at this point.
Fast forward 1 week after the followup shot, and Cleo's stools are still as soft/goopy/unformed as ever. I slowed on the pumpkin to ween her off but completely stopped giving it to her after my roommate found bright orange and very soft stool on her bathroom rug right outside the litter box. Cleo never EVER poops outside the litter box, and she has done it every day for the past week or so. She sometimes poops inside the box, but only when her stools are at least somewhat firm.
Today I found blood in her diarrhea and, again, she pooped outside the litter box. She went to the bathroom again this evening and this time pooped inside the litterbox, but she meowed incessantly right before and right after her movement so I think it was still a very uncomfortable experience. It was extremely foul smelling too, I had my bedroom door shut and I immediately knew what she had been meowing about.
***** She has not been vomiting at all and her appetite and her thirst have been great. She has also been filling out recently and looks a healthy weight for the first time, rather than just a skinny little thing.
I am going to take her to the vet again ASAP, but I want to know if you guys have any idea what it could be. I am at my wit's end and I have searched the internet endlessly for any hint. The only cause I can think of is the spay because she was the epitome of health before the surgery. Perhaps it weakened her immune system and allowed some sort of parasite to wreak havoc over her little body... but that's just a theory.
I'm all ears! Please let me know if you need any more details. I just need advice from a community full of cat folk. Thanks!Edited by author Sat Mar 16, '13 9:53am PST
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I am not asking for advice to skip the vet, but to maybe to brainstorm and hopefully eventually come to a conclusion what Cleo's problem could possibly be. Perhaps someone has had a similar experience on this board. Because of your suggestion I have started feeding her a little bit more canned food than usual and adding lots of water when I serve it to her. I would add water from time to time in the past when I was worried she wasn't drinking enough. She loves that is had become part of a daily routine 
