{"id":575,"date":"2014-04-06T04:45:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-06T04:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eaumaison.wordpress.com\/2014\/04\/06\/mollys-illness"},"modified":"2014-04-06T04:45:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-06T04:45:00","slug":"mollys-illness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/2014\/04\/06\/mollys-illness\/","title":{"rendered":"Molly’s illness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our cat Molly has led me on a mystery this past month.\u00a0 I started finding blood spots on my bed sheets.\u00a0 Then I tied the blood to the cat when it started showing up in other favorite spots of hers.\u00a0 The blood got worse, smears on the stairs, drips across the floor.\u00a0 But in every other way she was perfectly normal.\u00a0 Happy, diet and elimination all normal.\u00a0 No signs of illness, no visible wounds.\u00a0 It always appeared in the morning, so I never caught her bleeding.\u00a0 A complete mystery.<\/p>\n

I suspected a UTI.\u00a0 Instead of taking her to the vet right away, since she seemed ok, we switched up her diet and gave her supplements.\u00a0 After a week it hadn’t improved.\u00a0 I also noticed the blood was whole, not diluted like you would expect with a UTI (and I would know – I’ve cleaned up a LOT of blood in my old line of work \ud83d\ude09\u00a0 <\/p>\n

I begrudgingly took her to the vet.\u00a0 Everything checked out normal again.\u00a0 The vet was stumped.\u00a0 When the urinalysis came back normal she said without more data, all we can assume is that she had a UTI that she cleared up, assisted by our diet changes.\u00a0 She gave me a plan for if we wanted to search further, but I didn’t feel like it was worth the expense (I just spent $101 for a check-up and UA that was all within normal limits, felt like a waste of money).<\/p>\n

The blood stopped after that.\u00a0 I hoped she was better.\u00a0 I suspected it was a nosebleed, after talking with Andy, because that fit the pattern and explained the lack of wound.\u00a0 Then last week I heard Molly yowl up on my bed.\u00a0 She ran downstairs and licked her tail furiously on the stairs.\u00a0 Then she flopped in front of Jem, showing off her belly, then casually settled on the couch under the window.\u00a0 When I got up I found these and many other spots:<\/p>\n

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I called Ben over and we examined her.\u00a0 The tip of her tail was totally bloody!\u00a0 I called the vet and she was relieved to know we discovered the source of bleeding.\u00a0 She recommended some bitter apple spray and agreed after our discussion that it’s probably due to stress.<\/p>\n

After further research online, here’s what I deduced:\u00a0 Molly has feline hyperesthesia syndrome, or FHS.\u00a0 It’s a somewhat rare illness, sometimes called skin rolling disease.\u00a0 The cat has extra-sensative skin that twitches.\u00a0 It can be worsened by stress.\u00a0 The cats react by licking, running away, biting, and scratching the skin.\u00a0 Here’s a video<\/a> of another cat with it.<\/p>\n

Molly has always had twitchiness like shown in these videos.\u00a0 She licks herself when it happens and sometimes scratches.\u00a0 The last 6 months she has been chasing her tail more often, and sometimes getting angry at it. \u00a0 She definitely does the running away suddenly thing too.\u00a0 I always thought it was general cat weirdness.\u00a0 I mean, come on, cats do really weird things.\u00a0 But Amanda said her cat never does anything twitchy like that, and I don’t remember Scruffy being that way.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

FHS often manifests in older cats (check), cats fed exclusively dry food (check), and in response to stress (check).\u00a0 For that last one, the first blood appeared after I hosted a big party and we did some furniture rearranging.\u00a0 Things calmed down.\u00a0 This last bloody episode happened right after we had some more visitors, and we had a stair railing installed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It sounds like they don’t know a lot about FHS, but they think it’s either an OCD type behavior in response to “neural-dermatitis” or it’s a form of epilepsy.\u00a0 The treatment ranges from playing with your cat, keeping a regular schedule, and adding wet food, to medicating with phenobarbital, gabapentin, and SSRIs.\u00a0 Uhhhh, we are starting with the easy treatment.\u00a0 She doesn’t seem as bad as some videos online.\u00a0 We are adding wet food, and if we anticipate visitors or house changes we can spray her with bitter apple to prevent biting.\u00a0 Like when we paint the house in a couple weeks.<\/p>\n

Poor kitty.\u00a0 I hope she gets better.\u00a0 She’s had this behavior for years as far as I can remember.\u00a0 In fact, for several years when we first got her she had bloody scabs on her head from scratching her ears.\u00a0 I wonder if it was the same issue. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our cat Molly has led me on a mystery this past month.\u00a0 I started finding blood spots on my bed sheets.\u00a0 Then I tied the blood to the cat when it started showing up in other favorite spots of hers.\u00a0 The blood got worse, smears on the stairs, drips across the floor.\u00a0 But in every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eaumaison.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}