Well, I wasn't expecting that.
Mac went in for his bladder surgery on Tuesday. They went in to remove his diverticulum that they believed was causing the blood in his urine. But, because there was so much blood, they were suspicious that something else could be wrong so they wanted to take a biopsy of some of his tissue as well.
Right after the vet had stitched Mac up he called me with the news. When he opened the bladder what sat in front of him was a very large lesion/dead tissue that was about a quarter of the size of Mac's bladder and that was why he was bleeding so much. The vet removed as much as he could, but since it was so large it was hard to get it all because he still needed to have enough of the organ to close it up. He sent the dead tissue off to the pathology lab to find out what it was.
I got the news today that it is not a tumor, which is good news. But, what it is isn't great either. It was a hematoma and they aren't quite sure what caused it. In a couple of weeks they are going to bring him in to do an ultrasound on his heart because they believe that he may have a heart disease that increases the chances of blood clots. If those blood clots are dislodged they can travel to other parts of the body, in this case the bladder, and form hematomas. Most of the time they lodge in the lower part of the cats spine and paralyze their hind legs.
Had the vet not gone in to open his bladder, the hematoma would have ruptured and Mac would have died. What's weird is that it didn't show up on the x-ray.
In any scenario, this disease is not curable or treatable and it will eventually be fatal. If you catch it early enough you can treat the cat with blood thinners to elongate their lives, maybe by a few years, but usually they have congestive heart failure and can go very quickly.
For now Mac is recovering well and is his lovable, chipper, cuddly self and I hope that feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is not the prognosis. If it is I'll just have to hope for the best and love him as much as I can as long as he's with me.
I love you Doozer!
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Feline Hypertrpohic Cardiomyopathy
Posted by Allison Bonner at 7:11 PM
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4 comments:
Oh Al, I'm sorry. It's always hard when you love a pet with problems! Good luck Mac!
ouch i hope it works out. A while back while i was at heathers house i heard this distant meow a few days in a row. So finally one day i see this cat across the parking lot so i call him over and he comes and i pet him. But he is so hungry and scrawny i talk to heather and tell her we should take him in. So we do but the first step is taking him to the vet. It's clear the cat is in need of some medical attention but we hope the vet can find out who the owner is. It turns out the cat is chipped and his name is chubs but the phone # listed with the cat is out of service. So we pay to have the vet run all the tests on him and decide if it all comes back ok we'll keep him as one of our 5 between us. The cat was the nicest thing he was all black and very fluffy kinda like my K'Ehleyr but with a little shorter hair. Unfortunately chubs (who wasn't very chubby at this point) came out to have feline leukemia. That was really hard for me to hear i wanted to keep him anyway and have him seperated from my cats. Because i'm a big hearted idiot. I didn't want to have to have this cat put to sleep. But finally heather made me realize that was a bad idea for all the rest of our beloved cats. We had him put to sleep and were going to have his ashes put into a semi-precious gem. The cost for that turned out to be a smidge too expensive at the time so we couldn't. But we were at least hoping the kitty was happy his final days were in a nice AC'd vets office where the nurses loved on him on his final days.
I hope it turns out well for Mac. Why do you call him doozer? Does he like to ram you with his head? That might be a good nick name for one of our cats who likes to do that too heh.
Awww...that's so hard to deal with. Give him lots of kisses!
well, it started out as mac, then mackie, then mackie-doo, then mackie-doozer, now it's just doozer.
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