- Joined
- Dec 11, 2014
- Messages
- 120
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My 18-year-old male cat has had issues with defacating outside the box for about a year. Strategies to address this haven't worked, so I just deal with it by keeping an eye out for incidents and cleaning them up. This morning I found a pile of diarrhea in one of his usual spots. This is unusual, since the stools are usually solid. I give him 1/8 to 1/4 tsp. of Miralax most days, on veterinary advice, but it hasn't caused this reaction before, and since I found the mess this morning before I fed him, I didn't mix the powder with his food like I ordinarily would have. About an hour later, I found another pile, fresher and probably made an hour or two earlier (the other mess happened overnight, since I had been in that room just before bedtime and would have noticed anything on the floor), in another part of the house, also a typical spot for an incident. I was getting ready to call the vet when I discovered two other spots in a different area, light brown circular patches of what was probably vomit. These spots are far more likely to have been caused by our dog, since we find them in that room every once in a while and sometimes hear or see him vomiting. So now I"m in a quandary. Did the cat both vomit and have diarrhea? Did the dog? Or did they both have digestive issues within the same few hours in a strange coincidence? The dog spent most of the night in my son's bedroom with the door closed, but my son said he let the dog out of the room early in the morning because he was whining, which generally only happens if he's about to get sick. I noticed that the dog also didn't gobble down his breakfast right away, which could mean his stomach was still upset. I don't want to take the cat to the vet if he didn't have diarrhea, but there's no way to be sure. I have a feeling the dog vomited, but I'm not sure now about who had diarrhea, although I'm leaning toward the cat. I guess I should wait and see if anything else happens and see if I can identify the culprit. Any ideas about what happened?
