@3girls3cats, my beloved cat is also a black cat with lime green eyes. Sweetest, most perfect cat I’ve ever had.
Now she has kidney failure (allegedly early stage) and we are going through some never before imagined problems with her not making it to her litter box. I’ve been putting down potty pads by her litter box, and I’m starting to wonder if those don’t somehow encourage peeing on them. Her little kitty room is for the first time in her whole life extremely foul smelling. I think a few times she had an accident on the wood floor and it must have soaked through before I discovered it. Nothing is working to get rid of the smell, and I’ve tried every urine odor product I come across.
Very disheartening. She’s also been losing weight-she cries constantly for food. I usually oblige, and she still appears to be losing weight.
She is 18. I guess I need to take her back to the vet, but I don’t know that she could tolerate any kind of aggressive treatment.
@Nrdsb4 I’m sorry. I’ve been through this with one cat and it is not easy to manage. It’s hard for you and hard for the poor old cat.
We ended up refinishing our damaged wood floor, but it was very damaged with repeated accidents. We also had a wool rug professionally washed and that worked well for awhile. It seems as if the smell is starting to come back now, two years after the cleaning.
Maybe you can talk to the vet and problem solve without bringing the cat back? Or maybe you can arrange for a vet to do a house call.
My cat seems to have had a hairball problem for at least the past three months. I’ve been giving him fiber chews, putting hairball remedy in his food (the only way he will consume it), sometimes a tsp of olive oil, but nothings seems to do any good.
Yes!! Some cats like Persians and Himalayans benefit from grooming. We even have a local cat groomer! The website is soooo cool I just have to link it.
LOVE that website! I need Alex, but he’s too far away. These three part-Maine Coons are terrible self-groomers.
@Consolation, have you tried asking your vet if they can give you some leads? Our sweet old Daisy (who died five years ago) used to need lion cuts every couple of years to deal with her mats, and we found the guy who could do that via our vet.
Some mobile groomers also do cats. We had one that came to our house and gave our kitties a lion cut. She was also the first to detect liver failure on one of the cats.
I don’t want to cut his coat short–he’s a Maine Coon mix–just give him a good thorough brushing and trim his nails. I’ll look into finding a groomer. I didn’t really think of it before in reference to cats! My other cat was no problem to brush, and I had a furminator. Which I stupidly gave away.
@Consolation, I get it, and despite their lackadaisical grooming, we’ve never really gone near the idea of cutting our three MC mixes’ coats. What we have is an absolute arsenal of tools, including the furminator, a kind of curry-comb thing, the regular kinds of brushes, a thing called the Fur Fetcher, and then one called a Mat Buster. And we shamelessly feed them treats to get them to tolerate it.
Weirdly they seem to like having their nails trimmed. Go figure. But each of them has a different brush/tool that they like best, and one they hate most.
I’m positive they plot this all out and occasionally agree to change it up, just to give us new challenges.
Cat grooming does not necessarily mean a haircut. It can be simply some good, thorough brushing to get the old mats out. If my cats were longhair, I would outsource that job for sure!
Wow, I’d never even heard of a furminator before this. My cats have all enjoyed gentle brushing and for all but one that seemed to be enough. The longer haired one would get terrible mats and periodically I’d bring her to the vet to have them dealt with.
@BunsenBurner, that made my morning. Thank you! It also reminded me of the spring break a bunch of years ago when S1 and a friend were desperately trying to finish an element of their CS major final project. It involved our ancient cat Daisy and a motion sensor-collar S1 cajoled her into wearing. She was a very, um, full-bodied girl and with the little sensor on, she looked like a pint-sized St. Bernard, carrying brandy in a tiny barrel. I’m sorry I can’t post photos - her expressions were priceless. (She wouldn’t have taken it from anybody else in the family.)
