Missing Sheba
This is a heart wrenching story of how we lost our sweetheart, Sheba.
Sheba was a lavendar spotted, petite, ocicat. Everyone who meets her mistakes her for a kitten and always the same surprise reaction to learn she's a fully-grown, adult cat. We purchased her at a cattery in January 2004 in Pennsylvania, specifically to be the perfect companion for Simba, our first cat, and it worked out wonderfully. The two of them had a great relationship that began the instant we brought her home ^-^
So Sheba has had this sniffle we noticed or a while. When it began, it was infrequent, she’s never acted differently or seemed sick, so for a long time we had let this go. In our defense, we haven't had good experiences with vets in the past, and based off of that having pedigree cats we felt that created the assumption that we would just pour endless amounts of money into medical expenses that in the end were unnecessary. We had a bad experience in the past with Simba (cat #2) with a corrupt vet back in Philadelphia. Anyways, back to Sheba, a long time of letting her sniffle go turned into 2 years,and over the past few months we had noticed it was no longer a sniffle but a noticeable difficulty with her breathing through her nose almost like sinus congestion. We finally came to terms with taking her to the vet since this was clearly not going away.
We take her to our neighborhood vet and after about a month’s worth of checkups, blood work, testing for things like kitty lukemia, getting x-rays, having her nose and ears looked at, and even taking medication (Clavinox) for two weeks, in the end the doctor found her condition was inconclusive. Since she is such a small cat, at 4 years old she's a little over 5lbs, it made it more difficult examining her. With all of his experience, (he’s a well-known doctor in the Redondo Beach community that even does house calls) he could not figure out what the heck was wrong with our cat. So, after a lot of money spent on visits, treatments and stress on Sheba, our vet recommended that we get a second opinion at this really good animal hospital in West LA. Although our wallet was hurting, we were honestly happy he was honest and at this stage we thought, what the hell. We need to find out what’s wrong with her before it gets really bad.
4/4/08
We get an appointment with the LASC animal hospital Friday morning. This is the nicest, most pristine hospital we have ever seen. The doctors are friendly also. They take a biopsy of her nose and they perform a cat scan. In the afternoon, we get a call from her doctor saying the biopsy went fine and they found she has Nasopharyngeal Stenosis, which is a rare condition (go figure) where scar tissue builds up in the nasal canal. It's treatable though which is good news. For today, she’ll need to take a pain killer and a prescription and she may sneeze blood for the first day home from the procedure. No problem, we’ll pick her up shortly. About 20 mins away from the hospital on the drive there, we get a frantic call. Sheba has gone into shock as a result of an allergic reaction she had to the iodine solution given before the CT scan and as a result, her lungs filled with fluid and she had stopped breathing. She now has non-pulmonary edema!! Apparently there was a 1% chance that she could have an allergic reaction to the iodine contrast, and she did. This has never happened in the history of that hospital or in any case that the doctors have known of. Since she could not breathe on her own, Friday & Saturday she was hooked up to a machine breathing for her. Sunday, she made a little bit of progress, her vitals have stabilized and she is breathing a little more on her own, but she’s in this oxygen enriched incubator thingie. Now she’s at the stage where they just need her to wake up and come to.. she’s been highly sedated since going into shock on Friday.
4/7/08
On Monday we visited her and petted her and talked to her and her heart rate went up from 140 to 165… she clearly responded to us being there. We could also see her pupils were trying hard to focus through her inner eyelid.. There’s hope definitely considering how young she is but the doctor is waiting still for her to pass the solution completely out of her body, which hasn’t happened yet. Her overall progress was minimal, but she clearly responded to our being there. We talked to her and you could see she was trying harder than usual to open her eyes and focus her pupils in specifically our direction. Her rate rate jumped up when we talked to her. In that sense it was a good day, but for the first time the doctor also suggested we give it about 5 days of monitoring her and if there isn’t significant progress, start thinking of other options. We didn’t take that well. At this point, she’s basically in a kitty coma and they can’t tell if she has neurological damage or to what extent until she’s fully out of it.
4/8/08
Tuesday overall was better. Same types of responses but she had started also moving her head, her limbs and showing restraint. She’s definitely coming-to. At midnight they called and said her red blood cell count was low and she may be becoming anemic so suggested a blood transfusion, we agreed and hoped for the best. There were risks but at this stage we’re all in for anything that could help.
4/9/08
Wednesday was a GREAT day - FINALLY!! The transfusion must have went well because when we went there we noticed a huge difference. The doctors and techs were all excited about her progress, Sheba is the little star of the Intensive Care Unit! She was clearly responding to US and in a very lethargic but Sheba way.. her personality is starting to come back. The tech was saying that Sheba was continually trying to get her head out of this oxygen mask (they’re still monitoring her oxygen levels) and when they took her out of the incubator to change her sheets, she sat right up. All good to hear. We left the hospital with much more hope.
(Wed afternoon)
At three o’clock the doctor calls Chris at work with GREAT news. After we left, Sheba had stood up on all fours and tried to jump out of the incubator!! They got to her in time thank goodness because she’s so weak that jump wouldn’t have been good, but they left that tank open and little did they know she was eyeing up her getaway that whole time! They then take her off of the oxygen entirely and put her in a normal cage. I felt I knew all along she would pull through and we would be taking her home in the next few days. Then, sadly around midnight she stopped breathing again on her own (her lungs filled back up with fluid) and she almost died. The doctor said she was basically back to where she was on Friday when she had her initial reaction; a huge step backwards. We then were tasked with the decision of whether or not to go through the same experience again, with the outlook of recovery now looking slim. It was a horrible decision to make, but we took the doctor's advice as to not put her through more trauma. Heart-breaking is an understatement. We really miss her and believe me, so does Simba.
In the end. we had a little over 4 amazing years with her and that being said we were very fortunate. Sheba was the little star in my eye and I know she’ll always be with us, in one form or another..
