Sophie Update

So here's the latest update. On Friday morning we received a call from the vet informing us that Sophie had gone downhill quickly during the night. She still hadn't eaten and she was jaundiced. Jaundice is a condition you get when your liver stops processing your blood to remove toxins. It's very serious and usually occurs near the final stages of an illness. So we immediately picked her up and took her for an ultrasound to hopefully get an idea what the problem was. At this point we were off of the idea of FIP (a nasty disease that kills all cats it infects) and were on to the idea of a cancerous tumor on her liver. Not exactly a step up. The ultrasound revealed an enlarged liver with some features consistent with lipidosis (more on this later). The rest of her abdomen was clear and unremarkable. Hepatic Lipidosis (or Fatty Liver) is a disease common to older, overweight cats. It usually occurs as a secondary illness when a cat stops eating for some reason. We don't really know why she stopped eating, but she did. When one of these cats stops eating, their body starts breaking down their fat reserves. The change is sometimes so sudden that the liver (the organ responsible for breaking down the fat) becomes overwhelmed. It will essentially clog up and stop filtering the blood. As a result, they lose their appetite even more and toxins build up in their blood. Sophie's liver seems to be affected like this. To verify, the doctor pulled an "aspirate" on her liver (basically she took a long needle and pulled some cells from her liver for testing). We are still awaiting the results of the aspirate. After the ultrasound, we took her back to Ocala Vet and she's still being cared for there. She is now on a regiment of antibiotics, fluids, a steroid I think, an appetite stimulant, and force feeding if she doesn't eat on her own. Friday evening we were encouraged by the news that Dr. Osborne had successfully fed her about a can of cat food. That is more than she has eaten in about a month. Hopefully with some food in her, she will start to make a recovery. We'll find out more in the morning I'm sure.