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Went to the vet yesterday since my boy was acting weird. Turns out he was showing very mild signs of paralysis.
(lemmy.world)
Vet said he needed shots to boost his nerves and if he doesn't respond well in a couple days he'll do an X-ray and decide on a further course of treatment. He's back to purring in my lap again. Hug your kitties extra tight for me tonight.
The feels on this are real, I dealt with this similar issue years back. Lots of love and advice for you already, but 1 thing is missing you need to hear:
This is not your fault. There are very few signs that would be seen by us that would indicate anything is wrong. Cats (and other pets) have instincts to hide the pain from predators until they are healed. No matter how much you love them, pain is weakness that is exploited in the animal world, even by trusted animals.
I hope he heals up, and I’ll be giving my cat a little extra love today.
Yeah and it can be so subtle. I noticed some slightly weird behavior in the litter box by one of our cats - he seemed to be straining and going from one box to the other. We got him checked and sure enough he had an infection. It would have been really easy to miss, or write off, but this is definitely not our first cat, and subtle signs are often all you get until things really blow up.
We almost lost a cat a few years ago because we didn't react quickly. She was behaving strangely hiding under the bed, and I kept saying, we need to get her to the vet, but I think my wife thought it would settle down. Then we got home from a hockey game one night, and she could barely walk. We took her to the emergency vet, fortunately just in time, but it was really close. (That cat had multiple health issues and passed away a few years later, when she was 7. I still miss her.)
What ended up being wrong with her?
Oh boy. You'd think I'd remember after $2,000 in hospital bills, but ...it turns out that was one of the cheaper visits to that hospital, unfortunately. As I recall, they were never able to diagnose it for certain, but they were pretty sure it was some sort of infection in the blood, probably from a tick.
Our cats are all indoor only, so we had no idea where she would have found a tick. We had just moved to a new house a month or so before that happened, and the previous owners had a dog, so our theory is that there was one in the house that got her. We were going on a trip with the cats a few weeks after that, so, before we left, we bug-bombed the entire house, in the hopes it would take care of any other ticks that might be present.
Then, a few weeks after the hospital visit, we noticed when we were going to bed that she seemed to be focused on her own tail, which was unusual. We tried to distract her and it seemed okay, but when we woke up in the morning, there was blood all over the house - she'd attacked her own tail and got it bleeding, then walked all over the house. My wife took her to the emergency vet again while I cleaned up the mess...it was in our bedroom, my office, the hallway and steps, and all over the first floor. They tried to bandage it, but it wasn't healing, so eventually they had to dock her tail a few inches. Apparently this is something that can happen to cats after a trauma like the first infection, no real cause other than that.
We now put that monthly flea and tick on our dog (who we adopted well after the incidents above) and two of the three cats; the third one is way too skittish to allow that...but he's never going near a door that's open anyway.