Dian's raw recipe....

Last week - after a traffic ordeal that I can't even bear to think about, I brought home 15 pounds of raw chicken made by the caring, if still swollen, hands of Dian and Wheezer. (You have to belong to the Feline Diabetes Message Board to understand some of these arcane references.) Anyway, I had been giving the boy cats Nature's Variety Frozen Raw for well over a year, although not always on a daily basis. Milk did like it, and he was frequently very willing - well, for an anorexic cat -to eat the Nature's Variety Freeze Dried Raw sprinkled on his other food. (Which unfortunately costs $27 for a bag of 24 medallions. More than twice the price of the regular frozen raw... I don't know exactly how freeze-drying works, but apparently it's a very expensive process. Lots of electricity or something, maybe?)

The point of this is, the new raw chicken seems to appeal to Milkshake! He has been taking a few bites from each bowl all week - and I have caught him nibbling at other odd hours. There are chunks of raw chicken included in the recipe, which is supposed to be good for the cats' dental health. Unfortunately, out of the six cats here now, eating the raw mixed with varying amounts of Fancy Feast and Friskies, no one seemed to be much interested in the chunks. I've been finding them all over the house, dried out and bloody. Until this morning, when I noticed that Milk had a big chunk in his mouth and was chewing on it in a surprisingly enthusiastic fashion. If he continues to eat the chunks, it will hopefully significantly reduce the future necessity of his having a dental, since I don't even want to think about anesthesia for him.

The best news is, I weighed him this morning before he ate, and he was back up to nine pounds, seven ounces!

Two thoughtful comments from Gary F

Hi, Gary F. (It always surprises me that anyone outside my immediate circle reads these things!)

This is the larger of Gary's two posts. ( A man after my own heart - I always remember more I wanted to say after I think I've finished...) I want to comment on his comment - wonder if he'll ever see this, though?

My first time writing: Sorry about your cat, you've shown a lot of love.

Thank you, Gary - I can't even put into words how much I have loved this little cat since the very first minute I saw him, half dead in the cage at PetSmart.

My cat Smokey is also on phenobarb for seizures. Thanks for posting the video, it helped.

(Kind of ghoulish, though, don't you think?)

My experience is as follows.

1) Don't try to stop seizures by experimenting. Seizures trigger when the cat is resting, and all you can hope to do is keep him comfortable and minimize the freq.

I have frankly been experimenting with his medication - which I know is not recommended, but to be truthful, it never made any sense to me that you had to always give the exact same dosage all the time - if the medication is intended to achieve a regular specific constant level in the blood, then what difference does it make to give another quarter or half pill periodically? It's all going to even out in the end, right? And because of the hazardous phenobarb level that Milk reached prior to starting the Keppra, I live in mortal fear that it might happen again. I have accepted that he's apparently not going to be able to be "controlled" without phenobarb, but I want the dosage to be as minimal as possible while still being effective. (The whole issue of phenobarb is complicated by the anorexia. Less phenobarb = more appetite = more seizures. It's a delicate balancing act, at best.)

1)Milkshake may be losing weight due to an open tooth and intense pain (May 16th chewing episode, teeth do break during seizures). Smokey had 2 open canines that were extracted and he perked up.

Nope, his teeth are excellent. I'm big on dentals for the cats, and I do have the vet check him each appointment. He's still very young, which I think helps. I don't know what I would think about the idea of anesthesia for him (to have a dental, for example.) Your Smokey didn't have any problem with it?

Milk's lost weight because he has been anorexic since the very first phenobarb pill. "Paradoxical reaction", I assume. He never got over the dopiness, or the incoordination or any of the other unfortunate side effects of phenobarb, either. I kept waiting for them to disappear, and they never did, until his liver function values were affected. Apparently, despite the large doses of Keppra, he needs the phenobarb to control the seizures no matter what.

2) Be consistent with the phenobarb doses and timing. Don't increase the night dose. Seizures are a barbiturate roller coaster with periods of highs, withdrawals and possibly headaches.

Too late, I'm afraid. ( **antijinx**) He has been on uneven doses of both phenobarb and keppra for weeks now, and so far, so good - we are approaching the longest time he's ever gone without having a seizure - it will be two months in a couple of days. That doesn't seem like a very long time, of course, but it feels like a real achievement - and a blessing for Milk - from here. As I said above, if the amounts of the drug in the blood are intended to level themselves out, then I really don't see what difference it makes. That said, I'm terrified that this switching to the larger Keppra pills is going to turn out to be a problem. Terrified.

3)Smokey is 14 lbs, and gets 10.5 MG of Phenobarb every 12 hours based on a blood target below 30. No Keppra. I have a laboratory grade scale that I bought from a local university salvage department for $35. (I can weigh the paper cicle cut from a 3 ring hole punch). I cut the tablets with a small wire cutter, then rub them on a mechanics file to grind them to my target weight. It takes time to find equipment like this. In the meantime get a $20 gunpowder scale (used for reloading ammo). Cut a plastic drinking straw to your pill target weight as your "transfer standard". Now you can check your scale week after week, because it will drift and hang up. (Don't use a cut pill for your standard, it absorbs moisture or can flake apart).

This is VERY interesting! (And my husband actually HAS a gunpowder scale - not that I'd use it for Milk, of course, since it's covered with gunpowder..... He's a skeet shooter. My husband, not Milkshake.) I do worry because no two pills ever end up the same size. I have a friend who grinds up all of her cat's pills and uses a special scale to weigh them. Her concern is the amount of filler in the pills, and that stuff about how generics are allowed to vary from the original brand name drug by up to 20%. I don't know if there's any way to know that kind of information, though. And I had heard about not using generics for brain problems, but didn't remember that until just recently. Keppra is an incredibly expensive drug - even the generic from Canada costs hundreds of dollars.

4) Put a dab of Nutri-cal on your finger and then in the cat's mouth at least 4 times a day to help him gain weight/vitamins. Then use an eye dropper to squirt fresh water in his mouth to hydrate him, even if he objects. Just like you'd do to a baby.

I bottlefeed Milk with a kitten bottle - he doesn't seem to mind, and I don't have to worry about damaging his teeth or injuring the delicate tissues in his mouth with a syringe. I feed him canned EVO Cat and Kitten food, which is a human grade cat food product. I have a (currently) diet-controlled diabetic cat, also, and I'm very cautious about what all the cats eat, and about making sure they have adequate hydration. I don't give any of the cats food that contains wheat gluten, and usually, they eat some raw along with the canned. Most days, I give Milk two 4 ounce bottles. Left to his own devices, unless his phenobarb level has fallen to 24 or under, he just doesn't choose to eat much of anything.

5) No one can catch Smokey for his 12 hour drugs except my wife and self. To do it we set the oven timer, and when it goes off we whistle like the timer. He comes out, jumps up onto the window ledge and waits for his pill and his treats.

I wish I could get Milk trained to respond like Smokey! I even bought a clicker.... The worst time we had in this miserable epilepsy journey was a couple months ago, when he absolutely refused to let me get hold of him for pilling. His pills were never on time, and I was getting NO sleep. That sort of settled down, and now, most of the time, I can get hold of him without a huge amount of difficulty. Once I've got him, he just sits on the counter and waits patiently until I've wrapped the pills in the Pill Pockets and gotten everything ready. (But if I get the pills ready first, and he hears the Pill Pocket bag crinkling, he's gone in a flash. No dummy!)

6)I use food coloring with a toothpick to put green dots on his morning drug dose and red dots on the night dose. If he spits the pill, I have a better chance of determing when he did it and what I should do about it.

What a clever idea this is!

Thanks for saving Milkshake. He's had a much better life than he would have with most people.

Thank you, Gary F, for the kind words and your suggestions. I think Smokey must be a lucky cat, too!
garyf

July 13, 2008 3:01 AM

Seems better.....

Talk about your waffling.....

Well, I'm sure he's not blind, and he's not sleeping so much, and he's even been sleeping with me a couple of days in the last week. I asked Dian about the possibility that she might be willing to make her raw recipe to sell to me, and she says she is. She brought a sample yesterday, and Scruffy was the only one who was willing to eat it right off the bat. (And then he threw up. But he always throws up. Plus, he polished off the other three bowls during the course of the day.) By the evening meal, Scruffy was still enthused, Burble had given up and decided it was worth trying, and even my little Milk actually ate five or six bites. Which he did again this morning, and this evening. Not a lot, and it's mixed about half and half with Fancy Feast, but still a very good sign, hopefully.

He's still getting over Stephen's visit, sadly. All that time huddled under the couch, the poor thing. But he looks a little better. I upped the EVO bottles to two a day, and that seems to have helped significantly.

I brought little Toot out to converse with the Big Boys twice this weekend. The first time, Milk was napping on the bench beside the computer. I put her down beside him, and he really didn't react at all - he sniffed her, and she sort of hissed at him (having been hissed at efficiently by Scruffy a minute before.) And then she kind of snuggled into Milk's stomach, and he gave her a little lick- it was very sweet. They actually touched noses before Tooter jumped down. Milk has been hanging out around the screen door, like he's realized that there are two more candidates for him to snuggle up to somewhere along the way. And I've seen him actually sniffing Minnie right up against the screen. It'd be nice if the two girls would know right away that Milky will be their friend.

The new Keppra came in only five days, which was a wonder, considering the mixup in sending the prescription that delayed the order's even being placed for 8 days. I don't know if it was a good idea to order the 500mg pills or not - I was thinking that it would end up cheaper because they could be chopped up into more pieces, but their size isn't conducive to being easily chopped, I'm afraid. They are longer ( a little) and wider ( another little) , but the main size difference is in the thickness, which is impossible to do anything about. (Could I slice them in half across the middle? Doubt it.) And the math is going to be a definite problem. I am hoping that, like the dosage of both phenobarbital and Keppra he's getting now, I can get it close enough to a regular amount that will still hold off the seizures. Please. It's odd how quickly I get used to his not having seizures - like the reality of the disorder is so awful that it's worth doing almost anything not to have to think of it or something. He seems more alert the last day or two, which makes me worry about his phenobarb level dropping too low. Last night, he was all over the cat tree - dangling from one claw, hopping from the floor to the top in one jump, talking to himself while he walked all around it. You would never have watched that performance and thought that there was a thing in the world wrong with him. So, yeah, this is a great time to start messing around with his medication, right? He's got enough of the smaller Keppras to last less than a week, and will need a new prescription for phenobarb in the next few days, too. Fingers crossed.