“Your cat has fractures in both his hips”
Those are the worst words to hear
when you have brought your cat in for hypercalcemia. The thought that start
running are the worst about how you could have done things differently for
them. In August of 2015 we had brought in our cat for a dental cleaning and
check-up. The vet ran normal blood work before anesthesia and discovered our
cat’s ionized calcium level was 1.69 mmol/L which was above normal and had been
rising for the past 2 months. We had been left in the dark until that exact
moment. First it’s a feeling of anger because you feel like you should have
known something was wrong with your little fur baby, then you move on to being
pissed off at the vets for not giving you a heads up that his tests were
showing an increased level.
We were giving a referral to a
local specialty vet so we could have more specialized tests done and start that
wait. I call them that very day and got an appointment with an internal medicine
specialist which was just scary thinking about it. They book up so fast it was
a 3 week wait and wonder what was going on with my cat. I googled everything I could
find out on hypercalcemia and just scared myself to death with what he could
have and what choices we would have to make.
When the appointment finally came
around and they were asking about other things that were going on with him and I
told them that he had been diagnosed in December with what appeared to be arthritis
in both of this hips. They wanted to get another set of x-rays and let the surgeon
take a look at them. It was the longest 30 minutes of my life waiting for them
to draw his blood and take another set of x-rays. When the vet came back in she
gave us the bad news that he had 2 slipped caps in this femur. He had been
living with basically 2 broken hips for almost 9 months, my heart just sunk
that I had let it go on for this long just believing he was just unlucky to
have gotten arthritis as a young one.
The vet brought in the surgeon to
talk us through this diagnoses and needing a double FHO surgery but not being
comfortable with doing it because of the calcium numbers. He explained
everything that was wrong and about how common it is in young neutered male
cats. It was so much information to take in hearing my cat needed to undergo a
major surgery on both of this hips, hearing that first they have to find out
why his calcium is so high maybe its cancer.
That night I googled everything on
FHO surgery and what the recovery was like, what I could expect for cost, what
kind of life he would have, and what feelings I should have. There actually
wasn’t a lot of real life experiences online for cats. It just left me
wondering about all the questions I couldn’t get answers to. I cried so hard
the next day thinking of the worse that could happen. Would I have to make a
horrible choice because this was something that wasn’t possible. How do you make
that choice? How do you know when to stop? I made my husband promise me that we
would give the cat a chance at being a normal boy again, to be the kitten we
had adopted 2 years ago.
