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Living with a disabled cat

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Anlina
Captain

PostPosted: Wed Oct 01, 2008 10:15 pm


How many of you live with a disabled cat?

What kind of disability does your cat have?

Have you had to make any changes to your house or lifestyle or do you provide any special care for your cat?

How does your cat cope with their disability?

---

My cat Violet has a stubby foot, which she was born with. One of her rear paws has no toes. She also has a short tail.

This doesn't seem to hold her back at all though. She runs and climbs and does all the things cats normally do. She does have a tendency for her rear end to slip off narrow ledges, such as a small window sill or the back of the couch, but otherwise she gets around just as well as a cat with all her toes. She doesn't require any special care and doesn't even seem to know she's missing any parts.

I was looking into adopting a kitten with cerebellar hypoplasia recently, but she was adopted by another experienced cat person. I was anticipating having to put up baby gates to block off the stairs, put down some mats for a less slippery surface and perhaps provide ramps or steps up on to furniture, since she was still having a hard time walking when she was adopted.

I'm also looking at a cat with one eye as the next addition to the family. Having interacted with her at the shelter she doesn't seem hindered at all by only having one eye. She does have a bit of a head tilt, and the socket might need vet attention in the future, but she doesn't look like she'll need any special day-to-day care.
PostPosted: Wed Oct 01, 2008 10:30 pm


At my beau's house he has a cat that lives in the garage. The poor kitty is getting on in years but he has become disabled. His fur is matted all the time and his claws seem to stick to everything and it's just a sad sight. He doesn't even meow for us anymore.

He needs every day care. We have to go in and pick him up, gently of course, and put him on a clean pillow while we go wash the one he had been laying on to get rid of the urine and things like that.

His name is Tiger but we call him Squeaker because when he was able to meow, he would squeak instead of meow.

I'm almost tempted to ask my beau to put the cat to sleep if this continues. Not because I don't want to take care of the kitty, but so that he isn't in pain anymore and he can finally rest instead of fighting for his life sad

Lily-Anne-Marie


Miss-Shade

PostPosted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 7:20 pm


My girl cat Faith has only one eye.
She was born without eyelids and has gone through numerous surgeries like taking out her eye and then taking living tissue and making a makeshift eye lid on the other eye. I was later told that she had such a hard time recovering from her surgeries and almost didn't make it.

She was under the "special care" section of the adoption webpage, but I fell in love with her right away and now we have such a deep bond.

Now, you wouldn't know she has one eye. She sees pretty clearly with her remaining eye even in her older age.
PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2008 2:25 pm


About a month ago I adopted yet another cat from the streets.
He's the most adorable thing ever, but he was so malnourished that even though the vet told me he was about 3-4 months-old, he still looked like if he was about a month old.
Due to his poor eating habits, he never got all the vitamins and calcium he needed in his body, so one of his back legs do not work properly. He kind of drags it.

Kleopattra


Susanna Kaysen

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PostPosted: Mon Nov 03, 2008 10:06 am


My cat doesn't have a disability. But she is 21 years old and her arthritis in her back legs has gotton really bad. we have to grind up meds for it in her food 2x a day, buy puppy training pads for the bathroom because she has trouble getting in the litter box on time and she can't jump on the bed anymore which makes me really sad.
PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 4:07 pm


My cat snowflakes is 18 and she was recently diagnosed for having a thyriod problem. gonk I have to give her a pill every day for her to cope. i have to stick it in one of her treats so that she doesn't see it and run away and hide. cry

Crazeh Spazzy Cat


Moonblossom

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PostPosted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 9:42 am


Does being a mental midget count? One of our cats is the biggest sack of stupid on the planet, he falls off things, walks into walls, etc... He's -almost- as clumsy as a cat with hypoplasia. The fact that his prior owner declawed him completely (back paws included) doesn't help, as he tends to fall off furniture and skitter across floors due to lack of traction. He also insists on sitting on the edge of the bathtub when I'm in the bath, and has fallen in a couple of times.

Our previous two cats had epilepsy and brain cancer towards the ends of their lives, which was pretty difficult to deal with.

Prego, the one with epilepsy, was pretty blissfully ignorant. She was on phenobarbitol, so she'd just flop over and stumble around and talk to herself. It was adorable, but very much akin to having a toddler in the house. We had to lock her in the basement after her pills kicked in to prevent her falling down the stairs. Eventually I took to carrying her around in a shoulder sling bag, much like a baby. She'd drool and coo and play with the bag and was quite content. She lived quite happily until she had a rather sudden stroke one night.

Tomasina was more of a handful. She had a lot of neurological symptoms due to the cancer, and would regularly go blind and get -very- confused. On top of that she was on chemo so she threw up all the time, and on steroids which made her bones very fragile and her skin so thin and dehydrated that it split open a few times, usually along her spine or the top of her head. Eventually we made the choice to have her put to sleep, because she was quite obviously profoundly miserable and had no quality of life left.
PostPosted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 7:18 am


Well, my foster kitty Cajun is going for her surgeries today. She'll be having her bad eye removed, getting spayed and getting her teeth cleaned and the bad ones extracted. I really hope it all goes smoothly.

Anlina
Captain


Simply A Detective

PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 5:01 pm


Well, my grandmother has quite a few cats, and she has a breeding pair.


She had a litter and one of the kittens didn't have any legs! But that doesn't stop it. I think it's a he..
He goes around the house I i think he's full-grown.
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An abnormal love of cats

 
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