Vet said he needed shots to boost his nerves and if he doesn’t respond well in a couple days he’ll do an X-ray and decide on a further course of treatment. He’s back to purring in my lap again. Hug your kitties extra tight for me tonight.

38 points

I had a cat that was maybe 6 or 7 years old when she suddenly started having seizures. After a seizure, she’d be wobbly for a few days, then eventually back to normal… until it happened again. Vet couldn’t figure out what was going on. We decided to try to track when she had the seizures—was it when she ate something out of the ordinary, got exposed to something unusual, on a recurring schedule? That sort of thing. We quickly found out that within a day or two of giving her a dose of Frontline flea treatment (the kind you drip on the back of their neck) she’d have a seizure. We stopped giving her Frontline and she never had another seizure.

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2 points

Cats don’t have the metabolic pathways that dogs and humans have that process and neutralize many common insecticides belonging to a class called pyrethroids. For cat flea control meds, these are substituted with fipronil, which is (less) toxic and doesn’t get absorbed through the skin, though when we were dealing with a flea infestation a few years back we still had problems when one of our cats ended up being flexible enough to scrape the gel off its neck and lick it off its paw. Bottom line, though, cats tend to have a lot more trouble with metabolizing medications generally, and tend to encounter problems with “cat safe” meds more often than you’d expect. You have to be careful about monitoring your cat after starting a medication generally.

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8 points
*

whoa wtf

https://www.popsci.com/flea-tick-seizure-fda/

folks who rely on spot-on pesticides such as Frontline or Advantage are 100 percent in the clear.

they might have to reevaluate that :|

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5 points

Frontline is actual garbage flea medicine anyways. Shit never worked when I or my grandmother used it. I got some good flea meds from my vet that 1: actually worked 2: applied much less liquid to the cat.

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4 points

OP, any updates?

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11 points

🤞 Thoughts are with you and your boy friend

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3 points

Aww what a sweet heart, make sure you give extra rubs and treats ❤️

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44 points

The feels on this are real, I dealt with this similar issue years back. Lots of love and advice for you already, but 1 thing is missing you need to hear:

This is not your fault. There are very few signs that would be seen by us that would indicate anything is wrong. Cats (and other pets) have instincts to hide the pain from predators until they are healed. No matter how much you love them, pain is weakness that is exploited in the animal world, even by trusted animals.

I hope he heals up, and I’ll be giving my cat a little extra love today.

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4 points

Yeah and it can be so subtle. I noticed some slightly weird behavior in the litter box by one of our cats - he seemed to be straining and going from one box to the other. We got him checked and sure enough he had an infection. It would have been really easy to miss, or write off, but this is definitely not our first cat, and subtle signs are often all you get until things really blow up.

We almost lost a cat a few years ago because we didn’t react quickly. She was behaving strangely hiding under the bed, and I kept saying, we need to get her to the vet, but I think my wife thought it would settle down. Then we got home from a hockey game one night, and she could barely walk. We took her to the emergency vet, fortunately just in time, but it was really close. (That cat had multiple health issues and passed away a few years later, when she was 7. I still miss her.)

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2 points

What ended up being wrong with her?

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4 points
*

Oh boy. You’d think I’d remember after $2,000 in hospital bills, but …it turns out that was one of the cheaper visits to that hospital, unfortunately. As I recall, they were never able to diagnose it for certain, but they were pretty sure it was some sort of infection in the blood, probably from a tick.

Our cats are all indoor only, so we had no idea where she would have found a tick. We had just moved to a new house a month or so before that happened, and the previous owners had a dog, so our theory is that there was one in the house that got her. We were going on a trip with the cats a few weeks after that, so, before we left, we bug-bombed the entire house, in the hopes it would take care of any other ticks that might be present.

Then, a few weeks after the hospital visit, we noticed when we were going to bed that she seemed to be focused on her own tail, which was unusual. We tried to distract her and it seemed okay, but when we woke up in the morning, there was blood all over the house - she’d attacked her own tail and got it bleeding, then walked all over the house. My wife took her to the emergency vet again while I cleaned up the mess…it was in our bedroom, my office, the hallway and steps, and all over the first floor. They tried to bandage it, but it wasn’t healing, so eventually they had to dock her tail a few inches. Apparently this is something that can happen to cats after a trauma like the first infection, no real cause other than that.

We now put that monthly flea and tick on our dog (who we adopted well after the incidents above) and two of the three cats; the third one is way too skittish to allow that…but he’s never going near a door that’s open anyway.

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