Heart Trouble

Shortly after her spay, Sally began vomiting frequently, up to 3 or 4 times a week. She was also extremely gassy and had some litter box issues. I took her to the vet who said that it was either a food allergy or irritable bowel so I needed to change her to a dry food that didn't contain chicken or chicken by-product. Ha!! There was only ONE dry food I could find that fit the bill and thankfully she liked it.

Several weeks after that, Sally caught a respiratory infection from one of our other cats. My mom took the two of them in for antibiotics. She was prescribed Baytril which gave her explosive diarrhea so I took her back three days later thinking that I'd just ask for a new RX and that would be the end of it. Not so. Dr. Neimeic asked me a question that would change Sally's and my life permanently.

"Has anyone ever mentioned that she has a rather loud heart murmur?"

My heart just sank. NO! NO! I can't lose her!! She's only 8 months old!!! Dr. Neimeic told me that she needed to have blood work, X-rays and an ultrasound to determine the exact defect, what kind of damage there was and what her treatment needed to be. There was a visiting internal medicine vet who could do the ultrasound and Dr. N would do the rest. I was only working as a part time teller and couldn't afford everything so I started working nights to earn the extra money I needed for the tests. Shortly after her first birthday, I scheduled the appointment to have everything done. The verdict: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It's the most common form of heart disease in cats and in Sally's case it meant that the walls of her left ventricle were stiff and thickened which interfered with her heart's ability to pump blood efficiently. Fortunately, her disease was pretty mild so Dr. Slusser said that she didn't need meds yet, but that he would check her again in a year to see how it was progressing.

The year that followed was full of trips to the vet for non-heart related things. She got stung by a bee and her paw blew up. She got a wicked dose of colitis. She had a bad reaction to her vaccinations. Another URI. Typical cat stuff. At the one year mark, I drove her down to Mira Mesa to Dr. Slusser's office for a follow up ultrasound and hoped for the best. This time, the thickening was much worse and he felt that without meds, she wouldn't last more than a year. Sally was put on twice daily Diltiazem and I quickly became an expert in giving a tiny pill to a small cat with a tiny mouth. God bless the creator of the pill popper!!

Amazingly, she improved. Dr. Slusser was flabbergasted. The Diltiazem was only meant to stop the progression of the HCM. Over the next couple of years, her heart function improved to the point where you almost couldn't tell there was anything wrong. Sally acted like there was nothing wrong and thoroughly enjoyed her life begging to be let outside to chase lizards, lying in patches of sun on the floor, playing with my make up sponges and capturing my heart more and more with each day.

When she was 6, I came home from work one day to find her breathing rapidly and stretching her neck out like she was trying to clear her throat. I rushed her to the vet and was told that her lungs were full of fluid and she was in congestive heart failure. They upped her Diltiazem to every 8 hours and put her on a twice daily diuretic and gave her a 50/50 chance of recovering. The increased meds made her very nauseous and she lost her appetite. She even turned her nose up at the deli sliced turkey my mother bought for her. Out of desperation we went back the to vet and she was given an injection to stimulate her appetite. After two hair raising days, she started to improve. After two weeks, you'd never know that anything had happened, except for the little yellow pill stamped "LASIX" that she had to take twice a day. Once again, she beat the odds and we went back to business as usual. This would continue for the next 6 years.

Little did I know what was lying in wait for the two of us.