- Joined
- Jan 4, 2021
- Messages
- 12
- Purraise
- 24
Hello again. I actually wrote to this forum about 4 months ago about my cat Swirly, who was going through starvation at the time seemingly related to her chemotherapy treatment. I was grateful for the help at that time, but was unable to follow up because life has admittedly been a sleepless, exhaustive nightmare since then, and even now I'm fighting against sleep to try and find help for her online.
For months Swirly was experiencing chronic vomiting, in spite of the chemotherapy seemingly having cleared her intestines of cancer since the start of her treatment. We were able to get past her food aversion via syringe-feeding, which thankfully seemed to help her realize that food wasn't the problem behind her vomiting. But the question remained why she was still vomiting, without any signs of cancer in her body. At a certain point, an attempt to change her chemo medications wound up making the vomiting even worse and landed her in a near-death experience with acute kidney failure, completely stumping the emergency hospital and her oncologist as to an explanation.
Finally, though, after two months of being off of the chemotherapy (and still cancer-free) the hospital was able to find on her ultrasound that she had a stricture in her small intestine. They figured it might have been caused by scar tissue building up from her chemotherapy. About two weeks ago Swirly successfully went through a surgical removal of the stricture (3 inches of her small intestine), which turned out to be non-cancerous scarred tissue on biopsy.
We really thought that was going to solve all of her vomiting problems. But it didn't. Just a couple of days ago she started vomiting again, had another acute kidney infection, and wound up hospitalized. On a subsequent ultrasound, they found to their surprise that there was a new stricture seemingly at the site of the surgery. It was a baffling development, since strictures alone apparently aren't all that often seen, and strictures after intestinal surgery were also apparently rare. More surprising was that they expected the cancer to complicate the healing process and potentially cause a dehiscence (separation), but the opposite seems to have happened, where either the healing was too strong and wound up constricting the flow of ingesta, or possibly healed with a lot of excess scar tissue.
The doctors all seem to be at a loss for an explanation, and seem to feel like the situation is outside of general medical knowledge to explain, short of another surgery to see what happened.
The doctors are hesitant to try another surgery, and we're currently trying to figure out ideas or possible alternatives to explain and possibly prevent another stricture if another surgery is performed. The question is, what could have caused the recurrent stricture, and how can it be prevented again?
Two thoughts that had come up so far are:
Any help is very much appreciated, and thank you all.
For months Swirly was experiencing chronic vomiting, in spite of the chemotherapy seemingly having cleared her intestines of cancer since the start of her treatment. We were able to get past her food aversion via syringe-feeding, which thankfully seemed to help her realize that food wasn't the problem behind her vomiting. But the question remained why she was still vomiting, without any signs of cancer in her body. At a certain point, an attempt to change her chemo medications wound up making the vomiting even worse and landed her in a near-death experience with acute kidney failure, completely stumping the emergency hospital and her oncologist as to an explanation.
Finally, though, after two months of being off of the chemotherapy (and still cancer-free) the hospital was able to find on her ultrasound that she had a stricture in her small intestine. They figured it might have been caused by scar tissue building up from her chemotherapy. About two weeks ago Swirly successfully went through a surgical removal of the stricture (3 inches of her small intestine), which turned out to be non-cancerous scarred tissue on biopsy.
We really thought that was going to solve all of her vomiting problems. But it didn't. Just a couple of days ago she started vomiting again, had another acute kidney infection, and wound up hospitalized. On a subsequent ultrasound, they found to their surprise that there was a new stricture seemingly at the site of the surgery. It was a baffling development, since strictures alone apparently aren't all that often seen, and strictures after intestinal surgery were also apparently rare. More surprising was that they expected the cancer to complicate the healing process and potentially cause a dehiscence (separation), but the opposite seems to have happened, where either the healing was too strong and wound up constricting the flow of ingesta, or possibly healed with a lot of excess scar tissue.
The doctors all seem to be at a loss for an explanation, and seem to feel like the situation is outside of general medical knowledge to explain, short of another surgery to see what happened.
The doctors are hesitant to try another surgery, and we're currently trying to figure out ideas or possible alternatives to explain and possibly prevent another stricture if another surgery is performed. The question is, what could have caused the recurrent stricture, and how can it be prevented again?
Two thoughts that had come up so far are:
- Swirly has been taking 5mg Prednisolone tablets every day since her chemo started. Usually it's supposed to be tapered off to an every-other-day schedule when used chronically, though in Swirly's case because of her cancer it was done on a daily basis. A side effect of long-term high-dose Prednisolone use, though, appears to be gastric irritation, bleeding and ulceration. Given that Swirly had an obstruction prior to her surgery, maybe the Prednisolone was concentrating in her gut at a high and long enough level to irritate the wound and causes ulcers, leading to a stenosis of the wound.
- Swirly may have a food allergy or IBD that somehow exacerbated healing of the surgical site. There has been some suspicion that a protein allergy (from eaiting Dr. Elsey's cleanprotein) may have caused her initial IBD/cancer, and that her newest current diet (NF early kidney care) may also have a similar/same protein that has irritated her intestinal lining.
Any help is very much appreciated, and thank you all.