Ginger

[Lernermichelle]

I am almost too tired to write, but I do want your thoughts and advice.  On Friday, the day I was writing about Ginger (and showering), I ended up taking her to the emergency room at night. She seemed very listless and paler than usual, and warm.  When we got there, she had a temp of 104.9, which is very high, and they wanted to check her in for IV fluids and antibiotics.  But I wanted them to do blood work, and in the hour it took them to run the blood, she was left with me and relaxed, and I asked them to take her temp again and it was 102.9. I asked them to confirm and they took it again and it was 103.6, then 103.8.  Could be from getting stressed again, but at any rate they said it was low enough to send her home with supportive care (sub-q fluids, keep her on dox, syringe feeding) and they said to take her into a steamy bathroom 3 times a day to help her nose, which is very congested.   Her blood work came out all normal.  Her hematocrit was 31, which is low normal on their machine, but it had been 53 the week before, which is high normal.  However, she apparently bled a lot during her dental surgery on Tuesday (10 teeth extracted) and the vet said her HCT could go down for a while from that. I asked them to give her a dose of Immuno-regulin and they did.   So I brought her home. Her fever continued to go down and has been consistently just above or just under 102, which is ok.  But she is still super-congested and not eating at all. Her pattern has been to be out of it in the morning and at night, but to spend much of the day on the windowsill looking out the window and to play with strings if I get her going.  Today she was heading in that direction, but at the advice of a vet married to a long lost friend who happened to call last night, I gave her .2 cc's of triaminic this morning, a children's decongestant medicine with chlorephrine (?) and psuedophedrine.  Her nose does seem a little better, but she has been laying in one spot under the counter next to the heater for most of the day looking fairly out of it.  While in humans chloronephrine can make us tired, pseudophedrine counteracts it. I am not sure if the medicine made her out of it or if she is still getting worse.  She will not look at food. By putting a very small piece of fancy feast in front of her a little while ago I did get her to look at it and lick it, but then she turned away without eating it.  On a website about URI's I did fine that one kind of URI tends to cause severe loss of appetite and some cats even need feeding tubes for a while to get through them.  I am hoping that her loss of appetite last week (she was still eating a little bit but then stopping) was due to her teeth being bad, and that her complete loss of appetite since the surgery has to do with the surgery making her mouth sore, the loss of blood, and/or her getting this URI right afterwards. But I am also worried there is something else going on.   She is scheduled to have an ultrasound tomorrow morning to see if there is any thickening or other indications of cancer, etc. in her GI tract, and if nothing there then an endoscapy and biopsy of her GI tract.  My inclination is to cancel the ultrasound and try to reschedule it for a later date.  My thought is that she has been to the vet 4 times in the last 9 days, feels sick from URI, and needs some time to try to recover from that without the stress of more procedures.  My fear, though, is that she might have something more serious going on and my delaying it further will make it progress farther without treatment. I am so confused and desperate about this decision that I even called an AC (Hideyo's) and have an appointment tonight, even though I am generally skeptical about AC's and have never used one.   Do any of you have any thoughts about whether I should take her for the ultrasound tomorrow or wait longer in the hope that her lethargy and lack of appetite are due to the surgery and URI and that she needs some time to recover from these?   Thanks for any thoughts, Michelle