Update on Raisa

a long delayed update on my baby girl raisa....this is gonna be long but simple.

she has been classified as chronic renal failure...so her kidneys can be considered as kaput-ed...

shes lost alot of weight....now only weighing 2.4kg and shes so boney...no signs of it going back up.

also...theres an organ above the kidneys that produces red blood cells....and its very common that when the kidney fails...that tends to go as well....sadly thats the case with raisa....although not too bad....that organ is still producing red blood cells...but below the normal range...just a lil bit only....0.1 below the normal range.

theres also another toxic thing in her blood....forgot the name...i remember the max of the normal range is 194....when she was first admitted, it was 1001....yes one thousand and one. after 2 weeks of admission and drips and pills etc etc....it has now dropped to +/- 350 and has stabilized there. which confirms her kidney failure.

so now, she has to be injected with sodium chloride (or something like that) twice or 3 times a week. 100-120ml under the skin on her body per side...near her back legs....which totals up to 200-240ml. she gets bloated after the injections, but its alright...goes off within 5-6 hours. :D anyway, these injections are a form of dialysis for cats...since they cant really be hooked up to a normal dialysis machine. this can be done at home...but im still pretty freaked about poking her with a needle so i take her to the vet for her injections...cost is about RM25 per round at the UPM (serdang and PJ) veterinary and its also the same in healing rooms subang.

another unfortunate result of the renal failure is that she pees alot...and i mean ALOT...worst still...she almost has no control of her bladder...and practically pees everywhere... shes peed on my bed several times already :x she pees even more right after the injections...coz the injections cleans the blood, picks up the toxins, dirt or watever u wanna call it and throws it out through the pee...

shes also barely eating... 3-5 pieces of her dry food per day...which is way better than when she first came back...that time it was 0. but we still have to continue force feeding her. vets has prescribed vitamin b complex to help with her appetite....its been almost a month of 2 pills a day and not much improvement. but at least she doesnt spit out whatever we're force feeding her. she swallows it like the good girl that she is...

force feeding was initially with soft a/d diet because cats tend to like it. but in the long run this aint good for the kidneys and we have to move to soft k/d diet...unfortunately, cats tend to NOT like food thats good for their kidneys....which means they dont like the soft k/d and dry renal food. currently raisa is on a mix of both dry renal and soft a/d. wat i do is crush the renal and mix it with some water to make it smushy...then add a lil bit of soft a/d for flavouring and put it in the syringe...we usually feed her about 1 or 2 syringe (25ml syringe) fulls 3 times a day. she also is slightly dehydrated... i overheard the vets saying her dehydration level is at 5% which is not too bad.

vets has also prescribed another pill called azodyl. these pills are really good. when we first got raisa back from the vet, vets gave us some of these pills...but after it finished, it was pretty hard to find....and she was not alert at all...and she looked very weak...close to the point where we thought she was giving up and dying....luckily, my fiancee managed to find some last stock of the pills at some vet .... so we quickly bought it, and started giving it to her again twice a day....and she looks so much better now....MUCH more active, running all over the place...climbing up the stairs, and also more alert. almost like the way she was before she got sick. the unfortunate part about these pills is that theyre really hard to find...almost every vet we went to told us that theyre hard to find...and that theyre really expensive...RM170 per bottle of 60 pills. another unfortunate thing about them is that theyre HUGE! so ur gonna need skill to feed it to ur cat...which i dont have but my sister does fortunately :D

for the moment, my baby girl is doing alright...vet gave her a year mebbe less. so...im gonna have to prepare myself i guess. but still hoping for the best as we heard a story from the vet of a 10 year old cat with renal failure.. who survived to be as old as my baby girl...19. that cat has had 9 years of SC fluids injected and still surviving last i heard....unfortunately my kitty was diagnosed when shes 19...so its pretty slim that shes gonna live for more than a year :cry:...still thats what hoping for the best is for...


also, if anyone knows where i can get more azodyl around pj,subang,shah alam/mid valley area pls email me at kzijen@gmail.com ..im rarely here....and i have abt half a bottle left...