Here's the complete story for anyone who is interested.
Well, we've had cats (and a few dogs) since 1974. Our first cat died of old age at 18[char]frac12[/char]. The next one we got died of old age, too at 19[char]frac12[/char]. Before the second one died, we got three more, two of which are still with us at age 16. The third was my Yummy Tat. She was a petite, little Siamese who I had to give an inhaler every day for the last 10 years of her life. We were inseparable, she followed me everywhere and slept next to my head inside my bookcase headboard. She was sickly and was on antibiotics many, many times for upper respiratory infections. She died in my arms last February 22 - worst day of my life. Since we are in our late sixties, we decided not to get any more pets/cats. Well, that didn't last too long. In August, I decided I wanted another Siamese so we started looking at various Siamese rescue centers around the country but couldn't seem to get one that appealed to us. Finally, I looked on Craig's list and spotted an ad for two year-old kittens in a small town about 100 miles north of us. I contacted the lady who placed the ad and she said they were available, but only if we took both because they were sisters from the same litter and had been together since birth. She runs a dog rescue and had saved these two from being euthanized when she went to rescue some dogs. Not being a "cat purrson", she didn't pay them much attention. She had taken them to her vet at 6 months to get them spayed, but one of them had a grade 6 heart murmur and the vet wouldn't do the surgery and said she wouldn't live another year.
When I spoke to her about them she told me of the heart condition, but we decided to go look at them anyway. When we got there, the conditions were horrible. This woman had literally scores of dogs running around and in cages and these two little kittens were scurrying around, staying against the walls. She caged them every night because she couldn't deal with them. Well, we took one look at this and said we'll take them both. I paid her and we brought them home.
Within a couple days, I had an appointment at our cat only vet where she told us the other vet was right, Baby would probably not see her second birthday. I asked if there was anything we could do and she said we should take Baby to the Cardiac Vet Clinic at the University of Minnesota. I called them and made an appointment for Baby. When we got there, she was so stressed that her breathing rate was 160 a minute (normal is between 20 and 30) They did a chest x-ray and tried to do a cardiac ultrasound but she was too stressed to lay still long enough for the ultrasound. The x-ray showed congestive heart failure with an enlarged heart and aorta. She was put on lasix to help get the fluid off her lungs and we made a 2-week follow-up appointment. During the interim, I was to keep a record of her breathing rate. During the two weeks her breathing rate dropped to an average of 45-50. We were to give her a sedative prior to the next appointment to try to keep her stress level down.
At her second cardiac appointment, they tried to do the ultrasound again, but she was still too stressed out. The vet doubled her lasix and added plavix. We talked about causes and remedies with the Cardiology vet. It turns out Baby had a congenital abnormality called a PDA where a blood vessel going from the aorta to the pulmonary artery that is supposed to close shortly after birth didn’t close so it was shunting blood from the aorta right back into the heart causing the heart to work overtime. Her heart couldn’t keep up and she was in heart failure.
There is a procedure where the vet inserts a tiny catheter into the femoral artery and threads it up to and through the heart to insert a coil in the PDA, thus closing it and correcting the problem. So we said “Let’s do itâ€. We made a third appointment for November 11 to perform the surgery. We dropped Baby off at 6 am and they said they would call when they were through (at about 10am).
10 am came and went. 11am, noon, 1 pm. The call came at 1:30 pm and I was expecting the worst â€" that she had died on the table. Luckily I was wrong. There was a problem, though. The PDA was twice as big as the largest coil they could thread through her arteries and they were asking if we wanted to stop and just treat her symptomatically and she would die within 3 months or did we want to spend the extra money to have a thoracic surgeon open her chest and try to close the PDA by tying a suture around it to stop the flow of blood. They told us there was an 85% chance the surgery would be successful and Baby would live a normal life. This was a no-brainer.
After 10 hours under anesthesia, they called us back to say the surgery went well and Baby was recovering in Intensive Care. We were told to come pick her up the next afternoon.
Long story short with a happy ending: Baby is recovering well from her surgery with no complications. Her heart is back to it's normal size. She is off all medications and her breathing rate is averaging 26 breaths per minute since the surgery. She runs and jumps with her sister and terrorizes our two older cats. We bought her a T-shirt that says “Hello. My name is Super Duper Naughty†and she is living up to it on a daily basis.
All in all, this is something we had no plans on doing but I am so happy we did. She may be naughty, but she is the cutest and most loving cat we’ve ever had. The $8,000 was well worth it.
Well, that’s my cat story.
