Caturday: Tilly

Meet Tilly (full name Matilda). She is one of our youngest cats at 6 years old. She was the one who basically started us on our foster journey.

We found her as a kitten in our neighbor’s yard. It’s kind of a funny story how that happened. Our fence was old and had some missing spots, so one day two little dogs wandered into our yard. My sister and I tried to catch them but they ran back through our fence. So we went through the next door neighbor’s gate to the street behind us to follow the dogs. As soon as we reached the street we noticed kittens sitting outside our backyard neighbor’s house. We took note of that and continued to follow the dogs until we found their owners.

On the way back we went to investigate the kittens. They were no longer in the road. So we went onto our neighbor’s property to find them. I was having a manic episode at the time so this seemed to be a perfectly reasonable course of action. We saw a bunch of kittens hanging out on his porch. We got a cardboard carrier and proceeded to try catching the kittens. We only caught one because she was slower than the others. Then, because we weren’t exactly quiet, the neighbor came out to see what was going on. Once we established that we were his neighbors and not Animal Services or something, he didn’t seem as concerned. We convinced him to let us take the kitten we had caught (he called her Wobbly because she walked shakily) because one of her eyes looked funny and she probably needed vet care. So we took her home.

Mom was at work at the time, and as soon as we called to say we’d caught a kitten that looked sick and needed a vet she decided we would be keeping her. See, a year before we had found a litter of kittens on our property and took them to Animal Services. We found out they had put them down because they had upper respiratory infections. We didn’t want that to happen again, so we HAD to keep her.

We put her in the playhouse in our backyard and let her out of the carrier. She immediately started doing backflips trying to get away from us. She hid behind the play stove, so my sister moved it to catch her. As soon as my sister laid a hand on the frightened kitten she calmed down and started purring!

Once we had a good look at her we knew she was really sick, and it wasn’t just her eye. She was very thin all over except her very distended belly. She was covered in fleas, and she was indeed very wobbly as she walked. No wonder we were able to catch her. She looked to be about 8-10 weeks old, but was hard to tell with her being so skinny. It was the weekend (of course), so we had to wait till a weekday to get her to a vet. 

We fed her and gave her a flea bath, which she was very cooperative for. I’m not sure how much she could fight anyway since she was so weak. We kept a round-the-clock eye on her because we were so worried about her. Finally we got her to the vet and they weren’t fully convinced she would make it, but were willing to help us try to save her. They determined that her weird eye was just a cataract, not an infection or anything. They thought maybe she was blind because she didn’t react much to the light moving around the darkened room. It would need to be looked at by an eye specialist, but wasn’t urgent. What was urgent was her malnutrition, anemia, and massive worm infestation. They gave her worming medicine and flea treatment and that was about all they could do. Once the worms were gone she should start gaining weight again.

Well, she made it though the week and once the fleas and most of the worms had passed we moved her into our bathroom and stopped watching her constantly.

Soon her brother Ollie joined her, though that’s another story.

Tilly bulked up and and stopped being wobbly. We took her to an eye specialist to get that cataract looked at. It was something she was probably born with, but didn’t seem to impede her vision anymore. She probably just couldn’t see well earlier because she was so weak. We really did get to her just in the nick of time. She had cat herpes in her eyes too (not that big a deal in cats, and very common) so we gave her some eye drops for a while to clear up the symptoms. After a few visits we were able to establish that the cataract was stable. 

Once they were both recovered from their rough starts we spayed and neutered them. Tilly got a cute onesie made from the sleeve of a shirt with holes cut out for her legs.

And Tilly stayed remarkably healthy for the next 6 years. Until recently.

The Sunday before Christmas we noticed that Tilly had stopped coming downstairs for her meals and was walking very slowly and gingerly and seemed to be in pain. I panicked and we took her to the emergency vet. They couldn’t find the source of her pain, she didn’t really react to any of the poking, but they agreed that her posture indicated pain. Her bloodwork didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. They did an x-ray and thought her airways may be inflamed and her heart was maybe a little big. She may have been having asthma? They sent her home with pain killers and told us to follow up with the regular vet.

A few days later we took her to our regular vet and repeated all the lab work and the x-rays. The lab work didn’t show anything weird still, except her red blood cell count had dropped a bit and was just above anemic levels. Her x-ray still showed the airway inflammation, which could just be her normal, and maybe some constipation and possibly a bladder stone. She also had a slight fever. We set up another vet visit after Christmas and kept an eye on her. She wasn’t eating great, but she seemed to be in less pain. Still refused to use the stairs though, and seemed weaker than usual.

At her next visit they repeated her red blood cell count and she was now anemic. They ran some tests to determine if she had any infectious diseases that attack the red blood cells. They were all negative. So we took her to an internist.

That took a while to get an appointment, and by the time she did she was feeling much better! They repeated her blood work there and she was no longer anemic. They did an ultrasound and found that her spleen was larger than normal and mottled looking instead of smooth. Also there was a small section of intestine that was not layered, which sounds weird. A possible cause for both of those conditions is a mast cell tumor. So cancer. They also thought she was constipated and thought she had a bladder stone. They took a needle aspirate (like a biopsy) from her spleen and sent her home.

A week later we got the results. She does not have cancer! The reason her spleen looks weird is a condition called lymphoid hyperplasia which basically just means overactive lymph nodes. Probably because she was so sick as a kitten. It’s just her normal. The internist thought maybe her symptoms were all caused by constipation. Though that doesn’t explain her anemia or fever, so I don’t really know. So now she’s taking Miralax in her food every day forever as a preventative measure. She seems totally normal now and is enjoying the heated kitty beds which I’m sure feels great on her shaved belly! (This pic was taken before the internist visit, so her belly was not shaved yet.)