Nursing Bickey

Oh, the irony....Bickey, our large and lovable 20-something pound cat has developed an eating disorder. Somewhere along the way he was traumatized by something, became anorexic and stopped eating.....of course, a cat that big can lose a few pounds before you start to notice. Well he's lost about a third of his body weight, and now has feline hepato-lipidosis, which is a nice technical term for when your liver accumulates fat deposits after converting body fat and muscle to energy to replace the food you're not getting. Then then liver starts shutting down.

So he's on three different medications daily, plus force feeding high-protein food with a syringe every few hours.....but he's gotten rather good at flicking the food back out, so we usually end up wearing more than he gets down. At least he has stopped throwing every thing back up shortly after we give it him, which is how we spent the first week of this ordeal.

He's still pretty jaundiced, but at least he's keeping most of the food and meds down. He even made the trip to the cottage in Haliburton with us so that we could continue his regime. Some pics of the poor guy....

Mummifed Bickey awaiting his daily pill....the ony safe way to give it

Bickey enjoying some time in the grass outside to soak up some Vitamin D

In his Happy Place

What's THAT in your hand? Another syringe??

We're hopeful for a full recovery, but it's 6-8 weeks of the forced feeding and medicating. Fingers and paws crossed.