You will receive wonderful advise from this board....much better than
I can give you. My story is that a wonderful throw-away showed up at
Mom's. Due to some problems (read two dead cats at two different
vets) in a very short time, I took the little girl to my personal vets
(Middletown Animal Clinic) in Louisville, KY to be spayed and taken to
my farm. Dixie, as she soon became known, was FELV+. Greg Bishop
called with the blood test results and you could hear his heart in his
mouth. I knew nothing about FELV but he and Steve Koehler talked me
through it. We came up with a way to keep Dixie that involved me
sleeping in a garage with her at my mother's, then moving her to a
single wide then to a farm house + a home in Louisville. She was my
darling for three years, healthy and happy until a little bite before
she left this world and broke my heart. She had everything......All
of this is to say, don't listen to the people who tell you there is no
quality of life....I promise you, no cat lived the life Dixie lived.
Don't watch a calendar....we all start dying the minute we take our
first breath and no one knows when we will leave this world.....Don't
grieve......you have wonderful lives in your hands. Learn from them.
Accept them. Let them give to you and, in turn, give to them. I give
credit to my holistic vet, Betty Boswell, for helping keep Dixie
health and happy. Between Middletown Animal Clinic and Betty I had
the best of all support. If you have a holistic vet, please contact
her/him for support. For me, a mixture of styles work. You have to
chose. Dixie left this world in June 2008. In July, over a period of
two weeks, Dixie sent me two very healthy kittens from the pine
thicket she came from. Copper and Thomas Cougar live with me now and
have taken my grief and turned it to joy.
Listen to the people on this board who have faced this time and time
again. I have once. I don't ever want to again because it is an
awful thing. However, had either boy been FELV+ or if any future
kitten/cat comes my way with this problem.......well, we'll get
through it together.
On Nov 4, 2009, at 5:00 PM, Sara Kasteleyn wrote:
Hello..I'm new to the group. I am a bit embarrassed about posting and
asking for your expertise. Each of the postings I have read seems to
indicate you are all actively involved in opening your hearts and
homes to
rescue kittens, and my little FeLV+ family was recently purchased
from a
breeder. My husband and I have had rescue cats and kittens all our
lives,
and recently we fell in love with two Bengal kittens, brother and
sister,
from a local breeder. We purchased them and once home, realized we
had
major socialization issues to overcome, new to us. We have no other
pets.
Once having (almost) mastered that, with a great sense of
accomplishment we
took them to our "office" vet (our regular vet has a housecall
practice) for
their spaying and neutering procedures. During the pre-op blood
work, it
was discovered they are both FeLV positive. We were devastated, as
my only
experience with the disease quite some time ago was not at all
positive. A
lot has taken place in the field since that earlier experience, and
I'm
trying to educate myself on this disease, so please correct me where
I don't
understand what I'm talking about. The first test (is this what is
meant by
the "snap" test?), indicated the presence of FeLV, and a subsequent
test
sent out to a lab on the blood serum also indicated the presence of
FeLV.
An additional blood test determined the disease is not in the bone
marrow of
either kitten at this time. They will be 8 months old mid-November.
I began a web search which brought me to this group, and also
introduced me
to LTCI, which we started last weekend. At this point in time, they
are in
generally excellent health, very energetic, and have good appetites
(the
male will only eat RadCat organic raw turkey, the female is eating
Wellness
wet.both eat Wellness kitten kibble). They both have indications of
gum
disease, something I understand is not unusual with this diagnosis,
and the
male very infrequently has a cough that sounds like a hairball, but
is not
productive. An X-ray during his neuter procedure indicated nothing
unusual,
but it concerns me, primarily now because I'm waiting for the other
shoe to
drop since the FeLV+ diagnosis.
Given the background above, in addition to the LTCI, would any of you
suggest other steps we might take to assure these little kittens
stay as
healthy as possible for as long as possible? Many thanks.
Sara F Kasteleyn
CIC Research, Inc.
8361 Vickers Street
San Diego, CA 92111
T - 858-637-4000
F - 858-637-4040
[email protected]
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