Joe,
I am sorry to hear of your great loss! My Gray Kitty, who did test
positive and currently test negative for FeLV, battles anemia. He has
been on very high dosages of Pred for almost 2 years. This seems to
keep his hematocrit in normal range. His story is a very long one &
someday, I will write a book on it. Our hopes is that he will set
presidence for future FeLV cats & give pet owners hope!
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 8, 2010, at 3:50 PM, Joe Reil <[email protected]> wrote:
Good evening,
I don't know if anyone currently active remembers me, I first signed
up for this list in April of 2007, when one cat (Chewie) was
diagnosed with FELV after getting sick.
I haven't been really active on here since, but I thought I'd post
again with an update. My original introduction message is copied
below.
It is with sadness that I report that Stitch, who I mentioned
originally has having been tested shortly after Chewie died has now
left us, almost exactly 3 years after Chewie did.
Stitch has done great these last few years, we never had any
problems and had some hopes that she might have fought the virus off.
Sadly, this was not the case. She started acting sick this weekend
and we brought her to the vet on Tuesday. She'd lost a few pounds
since her last visit, and a blood test revealed that she was very
low on red blood cells, the Vet thinking that she had a bone marrow
disease as she didn't seem to have any new red blood cells at all
(could this be myeloproliferative leukemia, which I've seen
mentioned in other places?). Given that she was FELV positive and
was clearly suffering, we decided to have her put to sleep.
Anyway, though I haven't been really active here, folks were very
helpful after my initial post and the info and support I did get
here were instrumental in keeping Stich as healthy as she was for as
long as she was. It's still really hard, but I know that we did
everything that we could for her.
She was a very special kitty, and she'll be greatly missed.
These are direct links to photos I have stored on my Facebook stage,
I'm not sure if they'll work like this, but we shall see. These are
both very recent photos of Stitch:
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs417.snc3/25118_384112819913_539489913_3684055_4308847_n.jpg
http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs437.snc3/25118_384111604913_539489913_3684051_7341747_n.jpg
Thanks,
Joe Reil
[email protected]
_____________________________________________________
Howdy all,
This is my first post to this list, thought I'd do a
bit of intro.
We had three cats in our family. The older two were
both "castaways" that were adopted as adults. Zoro was
the oldest and I adopted him from a co-worker when I
lived by myself. He died several years ago.
The remaining two were Stitch and Chewie. Chewie was
the next oldest. She had a really hard start to life,
she was originally found, as a stray by some friends
of ours. She was probably two or three at the time and
she had evidence of being abused - she had some
suspicious scars on her underside.
She lived with them for a while, very shy/nervous and
eventually came out of her shell. A couple years
later, they had to move, and couldn't take her with
them so we took her in. We had her for several years
as well and while we don't know her exact age, best
estimate put her at 8-10 years old when she died last
month.
She had a loss of appetite and started losing weight.
She had two trips to the Vet - after the first visit
she took a serious turn for the worse so we had her
back at the vet only a few days later. A blood test on
the second visit revealed that she had FelV. So,
considering she was very sick and was suffering from a
pretty serious disease we opted to put her to sleep
then. :(
I didn't know much about FelV then (and I'm still
learning about it), but information from both our Vet
and online resources I found indicated that it was
contagious so we decided to have our third (and
youngest) cat tested for it. Stitch is the only one we
got as a Kitten and she's about 3.5 years old.
I brought her to the vet this weekend and she tested
positive for FelV. :(
I do intend to learn as much as I can about the
disease so we can keep her with us as long as
possible. I know that it will eventually catch up to
her and our main thing will be to put that off as long
as possible. She's still young and healthy so
hopefully that'll be a long time still. :)
We had been planning to get a second cat, but we've
put that plan on hold now. I know it is possible to
inoculate against FelV, but given that the vaccine
takes a while to take effect, we'd either have to
quarantine the new cat until the vaccine took effect
or find it someplace else to live for a month or so,
and on top of all that I don't think we want to put
Stitch through the stress of another housemate at the
moment (she doesn't react well to strangers).
Thanks,
Joe
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