A Long Week for Neville

Pre-dating the fuss about my veterinary hospital’s new policy, as detailed in yesterday’s blog entries, is the trouble with Neville. It started on the weekend. The poor fellow had to deal with the loss of his teeth though surgery, which was bad enough. He was not allowed to eat hard-food for a week thereafter, which undoubtedly annoyed and puzzled him. Then he became sick. He threw up continually, and was unable to keep anything down. As well, his poop was liquid.

I am unsure what caused the illness. It may have been a reaction to the antibiotics and pain-killers he was prescribed after the surgery. They can upset the body’s workings, especially the digestion. If the medicine Nev was taking instigated the ailment, then it was a delayed reaction. On the other hand, it may have been due to a kind of stomach ‘flu. It was identical to what Renn has suffered in the past - the constant vomiting, the inability to keep food in the stomach, and the runny stools. Then again, it may have been something introduced by the newcomer, Zofia. I believe that Horace had previously brought a bug into the apartment when he first arrived; it too seemed to delay its manifestation until after Ivory was settled.

Whatever the cause, the situation was serious. Neville wanted to eat but could not retain any food. Drastic action was needed. I resorted to the Cerenia I had bought for Renn.

It is ironic that I had purchased this precious supply of Cerenia for my big boy but the first cat who ends up needing it is Neville, who has never suffered from such a requirement before. Nonetheless, this is the situation, if not the cat, for what I purchased the drug. I researched the amount to be given (one millilitre per 10 kilograms of body-weight) and injected Neville yesterday afternoon. I was told that the reaction is often one of sharp but short pain, as the Cerenia stings going in. I keep it refrigerated, both to make it last longer and because the sting of injection is thus lessened. Nev didn’t flinch. A friend suggested that the usual reaction may be for cats not accustomed to receiving injections.

Then came the waiting. The drug is supposed to take effect an hour after injection. To be safe, I held off on food for twice that amount of time. When I gave Nev his late dinner, he ate well. It stayed down and at ten o’clock, I gave him a bed-time snack.

I didn’t get much sleep last night. Every sound woke me and made me wonder if it was a cat throwing up. The worst was when I heard the characteristic hollow, heaving sound - but realised it was Horace thumping his way up the staircase next the bed. I woke about three-thirty, as that has been the most common hour for Nev to puke during the night. By the time I had to get up, I had heard no evil sounds, and found no evidence of retrograde digestion. I think we had made it through the night.

Neville’s appetite wasn’t strong at breakfast-time, though he ate some. Today, he may yet throw up, though I’ve only rarely had to give Cerenia more than once, and that, I believe, was during one of Cammie’s particularly bad episodes. I will see what Neville produces, if anything, when I come home.

Reading about Cerenia has increased my confidence in the drug. I thought that it had something to do with calming the stomach, rather like a complicated form of antacid. I wondered how, then, a subcutaneous injection could do such a thing. This led me to read about it. It really has little to do with the stomach.

There is something in the body called Substance P (which told me that science has officially run out of names, like car manufacturers). This is a neurotransmitter crucial to vomiting. (How anyone discovered that is a mystery to me.) It binds to neurokinin-1 receptors, triggering the urge to vomit. Cerenia is built very similarly to Substance P, so it clings to neurokinin-1 in P’s place, but, unlike P, is harmless; once Cerenia is in place, Substance P can’t work its nefarious ways on neurokinin-1. This is why it’s better than something that works on the stomach, since it prevents the urge to vomit, regardless of what the stomach wants to do. In short, Cerenia convinces the brain not to puke, rather than the stomach, and if the brain thinks it needn’t, it’s not going to listen to the stomach’s arguments.

One injection may not be enough for the Nevsky; I will see what I find when I return home. And the Cerenia shouldn’t, logically, cure what is causing the physical upset in the first place, yet it usually does. When Cammie ate food to which she was allergic (which was everything but Z/D), only Cerenia would calm her reaction, and when it wore off, the reaction to the wrong food was also gone. I hope for the same process in Neville’s case.