Get Your Senior Cat Checked for Kidney Disease

Kidney disease seems to be a common problem in older cats, it's best to get them checked yearly from age 7 and older, if not you could run into the unfortunate situation we went through with our cat Cuddles.

Cuddles was a happy, healthy and fairly active, twelve year old cat. We spoiled her, along with our other cat Frisky. Back in late March, early April, she started eating less and lost some weight.

She didn't really seem to have any of the early signs, excessive thirst and urination, the first thing that told me something may be wrong was that she was losing weight. She had always fluctuated around fourteen or fifteen pounds, she was a little on the heavy side, so when she went down to thirteen pounds I wasn't too worried, but started keeping a close eye on her. Next thing I know she lost another two pounds down to eleven.

We took her to the vets, thinking maybe it was her teeth or something, he checked her out, asked the symptoms and asked if she had eaten any of the recalled food. As far as I can remember, neither her or Frisky had any of the recalled food.

The vet suspected it could have something to do with her kidneys, but he wasn't 100% sure, he wanted her back on Monday for a full blood test, we had taken her in on a Friday.

While we were waiting for Monday to come her condition started to get worse, she stopped eating, didn't drink much, lost another pound (down to 10 pounds) and just wanted to lay around and sleep, although she mostly just layed around and seemed uncomfortable.

Monday finally came and she went for her tests and then more waiting for the blood tests to come back. It seemed like a very long day.

Then on Monday afternoon, the test came back and confirmed what the vet thought, it was her kidneys and she wasn't doing well. Almost all her levels that were checked from the blood test came back ten times higher than they should be.