Making med time less stressful?

[tyleete]

Wasn't sure which forum to put this in. So please move if incorrect.
My poor gal has been diagnosed with food related ibd, scl gi, and as of Friday, HT.
So she has to take quite a few pills twice a day now. She's really feeling bad right now, and eating more baby food than anything else right now. Very little kibble, she can't eat wet cat food.
She's on Ondansetron & Methamazole twice a day, as well as 1.5mg of cbd twice a day, Elura once a day, & Pred 2.5mg once every 3 days.
She's getting to the point of not wanting me around, as I have to use the pill popper tweets daily and the liquids.
Is there any tricks anyone else has come up with to make it easier on your cats? The pills in treats never works more than once in her. She's too smart and sensitive for that.

 

[mrsgreenjeens]

Can you combine any of the pills into empty pill capsules to make less pills?

Also, see if there is anything in these articles that might help:

Pilling Cats [Must-Know Tips For Hiding Pills] - TheCatSite

Giving medicine to a cat can feel like a Herculean task, can't it? But don't worry, we've got you covered. Whether you're a seasoned cat parent or a first-time kitten owner, this article has the tips and tricks you need for pilling cats. We'll guide you through the challenges and offer creative...

thecatsite.com

How Can I Give A Pill To My Cat? [Stress-Free Techniques] - TheCatSite

Wondering "How do I give a pill to my cat?" Discover expert techniques and tips for successfully administering medication to your feline companion at home.

thecatsite.com

Or maybe something in this thread: How to conceal medication

 

[FeebysOwner]

Have you tried all the varieties of lickable treats that are available? I used at least 6 different ones in order to not give Feeby the same one every time. Methimazole can be crushed and mixed with any of them. Ondansetron is a bit tricky, or at least it was for me. I also saved back one flavor of the baby food meats so that it could be used for meds only. That way she was not exposed to eating them and getting them for meds. I just split a jar into condiment cups and froze them so they would last longer and then thawed one as needed. I also resorted to compounded meds too, although not with a lot of success. Thankfully, I never had to resort to pill poppers. For her that would have been disastrous.

Most of the techniques are listed in the above links.

 

[maggie101]

Wasn't sure which forum to put this in. So please move if incorrect.
My poor gal has been diagnosed with food related ibd, scl gi, and as of Friday, HT.
So she has to take quite a few pills twice a day now. She's really feeling bad right now, and eating more baby food than anything else right now. Very little kibble, she can't eat wet cat food.
She's on Ondansetron & Methamazole twice a day, as well as 1.5mg of cbd twice a day, Elura once a day, & Pred 2.5mg once every 3 days.
She's getting to the point of not wanting me around, as I have to use the pill popper tweets daily and the liquids.
Is there any tricks anyone else has come up with to make it easier on your cats? The pills in treats never works more than once in her. She's too smart and sensitive for that.

Ask your vet if any of the pills be in a liquid compounded so it can be put in her food. I get a pill,put in a churu tube, put her on the counter,tilt her head back,drop it in,close her mouth and wait for her to swallow. Has she tried weruva press your lunch(hydrated food) or hills a/d all very smooth pates

 

[silent meowlook]

Hi. It’s hard when they aren’t feeling well. Just curious if your vet has discussed Chlorambucil with you. Also, that is a very small dose of Prednisolone. Was there a reason?
My cat ( ex-feral ) very hard to treat. She has IBD, SCL, HT, Asthma ( so coughing fits if pilling doesn’t go well) Heart Murmer III/VI, CKD, elevated Liver enzymes.
The following are what she gets:

Methimazole 2.5 mg AM, 2mg PM
Prednisolone 5 mg PM once daily
Chlorambucil 2 mg eod
Denmarin 100mg once daily
Cerenia 6mg as needed for nausea
Metronidazole 50 mg once daily
Vitamin B12 0.5cc SQ every 14 days
Potassium gel 2 cc once daily
Lactated Ringers 50cc twice daily as needed for hydration
Albuterol inhaler 2 puffs as needed for asthma attacks.

I think that’s all. It’s allot of medication to give to a cat that was feral.

What I do is, I:
Get everything I need together without any fuss or looking at her.
I go to where she is to p
Pill her directly using no type of pill pocket.
Go from the back of the cat so I am not in her face.
If she fights or spits a pill out I leave her alone and try again in 30 minutes.
Once the pill is administered I leave her alone.

I do not:
Try to apologize to her or try to make it up to her.
Talk to her during the process
Allow it to take more than a few seconds
Try twice
Drag her out from anywhere to pull her.

Hope this helps.

when my cat was first diagnosed, I had her on 10 mg of Prednisolone for about 6 months to get it under control. Not all cats can take that much but she wasn’t doing well at a lower dose.

 

[Meowmee]

Wasn't sure which forum to put this in. So please move if incorrect.
My poor gal has been diagnosed with food related ibd, scl gi, and as of Friday, HT.
So she has to take quite a few pills twice a day now. She's really feeling bad right now, and eating more baby food than anything else right now. Very little kibble, she can't eat wet cat food.
She's on Ondansetron & Methamazole twice a day, as well as 1.5mg of cbd twice a day, Elura once a day, & Pred 2.5mg once every 3 days.
She's getting to the point of not wanting me around, as I have to use the pill popper tweets daily and the liquids.
Is there any tricks anyone else has come up with to make it easier on your cats? The pills in treats never works more than once in her. She's too smart and sensitive for that.

I am not sure what scl, fi and ht are, but it sounds like she must be on a ton of meds. Did you try mixing it in food? Something like tuna or just regular canned food etc. I had to medicate all three of my cats for 2-3 months twice daily and I got the ones who could not be pilled to eat it in Reveal whole fish treats which they absolutely loved.

If the pills are not in a capsule and are too large you can crush them and put them in small gel caps too. I used to do that a lot in the past, then put some oil on it to pill them.

Zena is easy to pill I put part of a dog pill pocket over it and he let me put it in his mouth, he was on the meds for 2 months total I think. It was hard. Now he is on an inhaler and I use crunchy bonkers treats to help with that.

 

[stephanietx]

We had an IBD kitty and he was on lots of meds as well. We found this worked great for pills. I now use it with my CKD kitty to administer her supplement and she doesn't even notice the pills. I do break pills in half if they're larger (like prednisolone).

Pill Wrap

 

[daftcat75]

Did you watch this one all the way through? There are more tips at the end after she’s demonstrated the main technique.


Betty used to take her A/D frosted capsules for about a year before she stopped doing it. She is impossible to pill and we both hate the experience. But she does reasonably well with liquid doses (when I’m not choking her with a rare dose shot too far back in her throat.)

Our current regimen:

1/4 ondansetron
1 mL gabapentin

I use the back end of a pill spatula to crush her ondansetron into a spoon. I squirt a little more than 1 mL of gabapentin into same spoon knowing I’m not going to recover it all. Then I pull up the ondansetron and gabapentin into a 3 mL syringe. I prefer the larger syringe because it pops the dose at once rather than asking a protesting cat to wait for the 1 mL syringe to finish draining. Twice a day, I catch up to her, squish her down, get behind her, tip her head back with one hand while poking the syringe at her grimace with the other. It tastes so foul that she opens up on her own with a couple of taps and then I try to aim for a side and down delivery without getting it too far back. She doesn’t particularly like this. But on some level she must know it helps. She doesn’t fight me too much or run away or hide. She gives it a one cheek effort to walk away. But she knows it’s coming. And I don’t try to deceive her either. I let her see the syringe so that she can know who to blame. I also let her see the Greenie hairball treat I leave for her after her meds. She usually has to pout it out first before she gets to the treat. Mornings we go back to bed right after that dose (5am!) and she sleeps pressed cheek to cheek with me until the meds kick in. Then she takes first pass on breakfast. In the evenings, I pair meds time with a brushing afterwards. So while she doesn’t like the meds much. She does look forward to our post meds rituals.

Betty also gets CBD twice a day. This is easy peasy. I got a particular brand where the dose is two drops (not droppers). So I put these two drops on top of her twice daily Greenies dental treats. No fuss from her.

 

[FriendofFerals]

Hi. It’s hard when they aren’t feeling well. Just curious if your vet has discussed Chlorambucil with you. Also, that is a very small dose of Prednisolone. Was there a reason?
My cat ( ex-feral ) very hard to treat. She has IBD, SCL, HT, Asthma ( so coughing fits if pilling doesn’t go well) Heart Murmer III/VI, CKD, elevated Liver enzymes.
The following are what she gets:

Methimazole 2.5 mg AM, 2mg PM
Prednisolone 5 mg PM once daily
Chlorambucil 2 mg eod
Denmarin 100mg once daily
Cerenia 6mg as needed for nausea
Metronidazole 50 mg once daily
Vitamin B12 0.5cc SQ every 14 days
Potassium gel 2 cc once daily
Lactated Ringers 50cc twice daily as needed for hydration
Albuterol inhaler 2 puffs as needed for asthma attacks.

I think that’s all. It’s allot of medication to give to a cat that was feral.

What I do is, I:
Get everything I need together without any fuss or looking at her.
I go to where she is to p
Pill her directly using no type of pill pocket.
Go from the back of the cat so I am not in her face.
If she fights or spits a pill out I leave her alone and try again in 30 minutes.
Once the pill is administered I leave her alone.

I do not:
Try to apologize to her or try to make it up to her.
Talk to her during the process
Allow it to take more than a few seconds
Try twice
Drag her out from anywhere to pull her.

Hope this helps.

when my cat was first diagnosed, I had her on 10 mg of Prednisolone for about 6 months to get it under control. Not all cats can take that much but she wasn’t doing well at a lower dose.

My goodness...bless you for all that you do. I know the drill and yours is even worse than mine. I have a former feral (19+ yrs old, 5 yrs indoors) with IBD, HT, Hyperthyroid, psycogenic alopecia, environmental allergies, food additive (not protein) sensitivities, topical flea treatment allergies, and asthma requiring albuterol.

We do morning Mirataz transdermal in one ear, Methimazole in the other ear (full twist AM, half twist PM).
Amlodipine 1/2 pill daily.
Amitriptyline 1/2 pill daily for the obsessive biting/overgrooming
Prednisolone 1/2 pill every other day
Comfortis spinosad oral flea pill once a month since all topicals make huge areas of hair fall out
Drontal as needed for parasites since the Comfortis is flea only, and this is Florida so parasites are indoors in lizards and roaches.
Albuterol, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly.

My little dude knows how to whip his head when you deep pill with a pill popper and can fling it like a pro and you find the pill later. He can hide it in his huge mouth/cheeks. He can regurgitate it from so far down his throat it doesn't seem possible. The only way to make sure it went down is to shoot it with the popper, check his tongue way back and add a little water in a syringe if the pill is still down there on his tongue.

He likes to puke the amitriptyline up immediately. Best way is to catch him whilst eating, pop the pill and get him to keep eating. If I wait until after he's done, he'll puke the whole thing. That's whole, crushed, mixed with chicken broth in a syringe....every way possible. And no, you can't put anything in his food unless you want him to drop a pound a week on a hunger strike. He would rather die than eat something with a pill in it.

He doesn't like treats, no way to hide it, he has IBD so conventional lickable treats and stuff are out of the question. He can't have carrageenan or most gums except agar agar. That could change next week.

Morning is giving him the two transdermals and interrupting his breakfast for the HT pill and pred every other day. Other days it's the HT pill and OCD pill. Another cat gets Flovent AM and PM in a separate inhaler. He's also type II diabetic in remission with no carb diet, Stage II CKD, Asthma, gall stones, and needs hairball management.

Giving so many meds to a cat is very, very hard, and anyone who has to do it regularly....I salute you. The best advice I have, especially if they are a "pill puker" that will puke that and everything they just ate right after pilling is I've found if I can get them to eat something immediately after pilling, it tends to stay down. Right now, it's rotisserie chicken (preferably fresh but if cold then pre-chewed by me, because the former feral is also toothless) and if I can pill him even with the bitter amitriptyline and get him to eat the chicken, he won't puke afterward.

My heart goes out to anyone struggling to figure out how to help their cat and do this--especially a difficult cat. My former feral was not an easy patient, that's for sure!

 

[di and bob]

I mix my med in Delectable Lickables in the stew flavors. I have never had a cat turn it down. I even keep it around to give to sick cats that quit eating, ask you vet if you can cut down on some of those meds. That is too many!