Where has the time gone? I was shocked to see that I haven't posted about Milkle since Halloween......
Milkshake has continued to lose weight, although his appetite is excellent and enthusiastic. (Weight records are in the sidebar to the right.) On 12/15/09, I took him to Dr. G because Busy had gnawed another large area on Milk's shoulder. It was big, and deep, and I was worried about infection. At that point, he weighed 8 pounds, 11.5 ounces on the vet's scale. We discussed having the blood testing for phenobarb and keppra done then, but I wanted to send them to Auburn, which meant that the sample had to be taken at the beginning of a week. So, I put it off, and the vet gave me a tube of something or another to put on the wound. (It looks like it was something called Animax or AnimX ointment.) Anyway, the bitten area healed just as the others have, without further fiddling around.
On 12/21/09, I took Milk back to the vet. He hadn't eaten on his own for several days. His weight was down to 8 pounds, 9.5 ounces at the vet. He just literally got up one morning and refused to eat anything. I started bottlefeeding him - first Fancy Feast, and then I bought baby food meat and EVO canned. There didn't seem to be anything specific going on. It was my distinct impression, though, that he was in pain. He was spending ALL of his time in the meatloaf position, with his head hanging off the window ledge in front of him. Very abnormal behavior. We decided to do bloodwork - regular stuff on the vet's machine for immediate results, and to send away a sample for an fPLI test. Here are the results of the vet's testing:
ALB - 4.1 (2.2 -4.4)
ALP - 30 (10-90)
ALT - 202 (20-100)
AMY - 920 (300-1100)
TBIL - 0.3 (0.1-0.6)
BUN - 21 (10-30)
CA++ - 9.7 (8.0-11.8)
PHOS - 3.4 (3.4-8.5)
CRE - 1.5 (0.3-2.1
GLU - 91 (70-150)
NA+ - 151 (142-164)
K+ - 4.6 (3.7-5.8)
TP - 6.5 (5.4-8.2)
GLOB - 2.4 (1.5-5.7)
QC - OK
HEM - 0
LIP - 0
ICT - 0
As usual, the ALT was quite elevated, although not as high as it has been in the past. The assumption is, these results are because of the phenobarb's affect on his liver. (I had previously been giving him Marin, but somewhere along the way, stopped.) While I would sincerely like to try stopping the 6:00 PM Keppra dosage, Dr. G. thinks that lowering the phenobarb is the way to go. I have mixed feelings, because I am afraid that, while Keppra has clearly contributed something to his lengthy period of being seizure-free, I think it's the phenobarbital that has been the most effective agent.
Dr. G. gave me a prescription for buprenex. Since he didn't have it in his office, his technician made a huge effort, and located another vet office that would fill the prescription. (Drugstores don't carry it, and none of the ones I talked to were interested in ordering it for me.) It seemed to make an immediate improvement. He had three doses, and while he still wasn't eating, the meatloafing was sharply decreased. The fPLI results were returned on 12/30/09 - 1.3 (range .1-3.5) So, whatever was going on with Milk, it was apparently not pancreatitis. He began to eat normally again, on his own, on 12/28/09.
To get back to the "experiment" - on 1/6/09, I dropped the additional 1/2 tablet of phenobarb that Milk had been getting at night for quite a while. (Uneven dosing has not been recommended, but it seemed to be working.....) And so far, so good. I've added Marin back into his daily pill routine, also. As there seems (**antijinx**) to have been no seizure activity after the dosage cutback, I'm going to wait a while to have more bloodwork done - going to the vet is such a traumatic event for Milk that I don't seen any point in doing it again so soon. Just keeping the fingers crossed.
On the home front, one of MommyKitty's kittens, OneBun, was "adopted" back from Animal Friends a week ago, and Milk's not a happy camper. I can't figure out why - he wasn't bothered by the kittens before, although he had never made the attempts to snuggle with any of them the way he does with the big cats. And he doesn't seem to be reacting particularly negatively with Pipper or Stinky, the other two kittens. Maybe it's the Animal Friends/PetSmart/Whatever smells that poor Oney had when he came home or something. At any rate, they still have not managed to resolve their relationship.
