My indoor cat died from non-regenerative FeLV anemia.

radarlove413

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I had made a post on this forum about my oldest cat, Dunlop, last week. I had mentioned he'd tested positive for FeLV and this was ruled as the cause of the anemia and had been looking for treatment tips.

I wanted to update and say that Dunlop declined rapidly and crossed the rainbow bridge yesterday. While I appreciated a lot of the replies talking about the accuracy of testing, I wanted to give more information that may be helpful to a member who is in my situation in the future.

Dunlop was adopted as a stray from outside. He'd had healing wounds from being in a cat fight. We tested him for FeLV and FIV then, but I found out last week that this was during the period where the virus would be at undetectable levels in his body. He'd been vaccinated, fully vetted, and had an extremely happy and healthy life.

Looking back, he'd been a big sluggish back in April, but I chalked it up to him getting some old kitty energy because he was 8 years old. Then he had an eye injury that healed without problems. After this though, I noticed him eating litter. We discovered he was actually severly anemic. His hematocrit was at 10% and his reticulocytes at 13.9%. Our vet ran the FeLV test to cover bases and he came back strongly positive. The blood work showed no signs of an infection or parasite, the xrays didn't reveal any tumors. So either he was starting to get ill and then the injury set it off, or the stress from the injury at his age activated the virus.

I appreciated some of the comments about if he had a false positive test. While I appreciate getting him retested, he went downhill after that day so fast it was stressful to get him to leave the house. Our other vaccinated cats have never tested positive for FeLV despite being vaccinated. I didn't feel like it was appropriate to question this part of his treatment because all the other indicators pointed towards FeLV. Nothing suggested cancer, a parasite, etc, especially because he was an indoor boy. If he had stayed stable I would have taken him for a second opinion.

I don't live anywhere close to a place that can do blood transfusions, so it was decided Prednisolone would be the way to attack this and see if his bone marrow responded. Because of his levels, didn't want to add an antibiotic on top of this unless we had to because of how his blood work looked. The stress of a hospital stay in a foreign city could have killed him.

So that's what we did. Dunlop was still mostly fine, but lethargic and wanting litter, for the first few days. Then his appetite faded away, he was drooling sometimes and showing signs of nausea. My vet was phoning me multiple times a day to check in, so after 3 days of him being very jumpy, we lowered the dose a bit to see if it'd help him get more interested in food. He had two different kinds of anti-nausea meds and that didn't help either.

My vet tried to source Eprex, that medication that stimulates the red blood cell hormone the kidneys make. Because of covid, they weren't able to get it in for over a week. We ran out of time. His bone marrow was too bad for interferon. They ordered a blood typing kit and were testing their own cats to see if we could find a donor.

On his appointment on Tuesday, his anemia was even worse. His hematocrit was at 8% and his reticulocytes at 12.5%. His MPV and Neutrophils had increased, which showed his body was processing the drug, but his marrow wasn't responding. Non-regenerative with a tiny window for hope. At this point we were trying to syringe feed him as much food as we could and he was good with it. He then appeared to have renal problems because of how he was behaving around water dishes and his pee smelled. He couldn't get a feeding tube because of the anemia, so it didn't make sense to do sub-q fluids for hydration if he was refusing syringe food. He went into respiratory distress after the vet on Tuesday for a few minutes.

After he refused water, we knew that it was time. Our cat was unhappy and we tried to give him a chance to recover. His quality of life was gone and there was a small chance he'd get it back. The vet made a house call and also let us know his prognosis wasn't good. We were heartbroken. We are still destroyed. In a few weeks we went from our healthy tabby that was the light of our lives to helping him cross the bridge on our backyard lawn, with the sun shining and the birds singing. It's a deep trauma that I don't think we'll get over for a long time.

If anybody needs a good resource, there's a great FeLV/FIV group on facebook that has a bunch of great resources. I recommend them 100% for good ideas. And if your cat seems tired, get a blood test. It's always better to be safe than sorry!
 

fionasmom

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I am very sorry for your loss. It was most kind of you to take the time to write about the diagnosis so that others would possibly be able to understand this if they were confronted with the same situation.
 

Kflowers

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I am so sorry this turned out the way it did. He and his friends were lucky to find you, to be protected and with the ones he loved all his life. That is the most any can dream of. What a wonderful world of love you helped them weave for all of you. That love survives all things.
 

gchinchilla1998

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I was wondering how your other cats are doing. I just went through something similar. My 8 year 9 month orange tabby girl Autumn was indoor only, vaccinated etc. About a week ago she started vommitting more, and then stopped eating and drinking and using the box. All she did was sleep and I'd set her by her food and on her way to the cat tree she would lay down which is something she never did before. I began syringe feeding her wet food mixed with water (I'd had to do this to her 4 years prior due to a mystery illness which I hoped it was again). At the vet she tested positive for Felv which was shocking because my cats are indoor, all vaccinated, and I made sure to do these things because I knew felv was bad. Her blood cell count/percent was a 6, she was severely anemic, with extremely high white blood count and globulin levels all over the place, and the vet said nothing was likely to help and the best thing would be to euthanize her. Anyways, I've been very scared for my other two cats who shared dishes and water with her, beds, the tree, the litterbox etc. So, I was wondering what happened with you other cats to give me some hope. Thank you.
 
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