Erik update

[cellio]

My vet called this morning with the results from Erik's blood tests. His white-cell count is high (and his temperature was higher than usual but not quite a fever Monday), so I'm to start giving him antibiotics now instead of next week when they'd be due (for the hepatitis). His thyroid number is also, for the first time, unusually high.

Back when he first started losing weight (a few years ago), the vet suspected hyper-thyroidism as the cause. We did bunches of tests and that number was always normal, so after eliminating other possible explanations (some scary), she shrugged and said "idiopathic". Now, suddenly, it's high. Huh? (She has no idea why.) One bit of good news, though: arrhythmia is sometimes a symptom of hyper-thyroidism, so with luck he doesn't really have heart disease.

There are three ways to treat hyper-thyroidism, she said. The first is surgery, which she doesn't recommend because of Erik's other health problems. Having seen the trauma the last surgery put him through, I concur. The second is a radioactive iodine treatment; they inject him with this stuff (once) and somehow, by magic, the radiation finds its way to the damaged thyroid cells and kills them without damaging anything else. There are two problems with this. First, it makes the cat radioactive for some period of time (a week or two?), and while that's true he has to be sequestered in a special facility. So, essentially, I'd have to take him to some place where they do this procedure (she thinks there is now one in western PA; you used to have to go out of state), and then I wouldn't be able to have any contact with him until he's cooled down sufficiently. (And I'm betting that during that time he's not going to get much attention from the staff, since they'd have to suit up to go near him.) Second, they will only do this after a large battery of tests, some expensive, come back ok.

The third option is medication. Both surgery and radiation are one-time permanent solutions, so medication sounds like the last resort, except for two things: first, I suspect (haven't checked with the vet) that factored over the life-expectancy of a 14-year-old cat, the drugs are probably the least-expensive option. Second and the deal-maker, though, is that according to my vet, treating hyper-thyroidism can make Erik's existing liver problems worse. So before we even consider a permanent solution, I want to do something that we can abort if it starts damaging his liver. If that happens, she said, then essentially we'd experiment to find the right balancing point, treating the thyroid as much as possible without harming the liver. Medicine is not boolean; a partial treatment can still help.

If I understood my vet correctly, treating the thyroid problem might also help Erik gain some weight.

These are my notes from our phone conversation; I haven't yet consulted Doctor Google for more background.

Comments

[cellio]

Glad to hear this worked well for Vandal! After everything folks here have said, I plan to ask my vet about the radiation treatment again. (We'll need to do drugs first in any case, which should tell us whether treating hyper-thyroidism causes other problems for him.)