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He has had two doses of antibiotics and antifungals and he is lapping up pieces of cat food and swallowing them whole.
He was active today and is playing with a catnip mouse..with his mouth no less.
Amazing!!! After the Vet visit, I felt really doom and gloom and the whole “there is no cure” worries.
ALso everything I have read on the net is kind of doom and gloom. I will just have to keep treating him and keep hoping he will do okay. I just couldn’t stand to see him suffer.
I also have a 13 year old min pin Terror, who has breast cancer and her lesion has pushed through the skin, it is also a bad situation, but she is happy, she eats, she bounces around. The vet and I are just watching her and when it starts to hurt or starts to affect her quality of life…we will make the decision.
My problem is that I have a lot of rescues and I have 4 dogs over age 12 and 6 dogs over age 6 or 7. So I know I am going to loose many in the next few years…I have lost 3 dogs in the last year 🙁
But, I keep thinking that All Dogs Go To Heaven 🙂
Rusti and ddvm have summed the disease up really nicely; there isn’t much I can add here. Like Rusti said, there seems to be an immune system malfunction involved: the body “decides” that the teeth are foreign material and starts trying to destroy them. There’s a lot of inflammation involved and usually the bacteria living in the mouth jump in and happily make matters even more painful. The biggest challenge is determining whether the immune reaction can be brought under control with medications, or if full-mouth extractions are necessary.
Antibiotics help by reducing the number of bacteria living in the mouth; using antibiotics long-term, however, can lead to the development of resistant strains of bacteria. Your vet may opt to do intermittent antibiotics, or may alternate types of antibiotic in an effort to delay bacterial resistance.
Steroids help by inhibiting the immune system. The trick is balancing this inhibition: enough to control the mouth problems, but not so much that it stops the body from protecting itself against infection. Long-term steroids can sometimes lead to problems of their own, such as diabetes mellitus or Cushing’s disease. Again, it’s a matter of trying to balance things so that the negative effects of treatment are minimized.
There are other drugs which can be used to inhibit the immune system, such as the azathioprine that ddvm mentioned or gold salts. Sometimes if a pet doesn’t respond to one drug, a different one will work. Also, with steroids, if the oral route fails, try the injectable route, and vice versa. Individual responses do vary.
Ddvm brought up a good point: sometimes a food allergy/food sensitivity is making the problem worse. In these patients, the hypoallergenic diet definitely helps. It may not fix everything, but it’s sure worth a try. Be patient, though: with food allergies, it can take a while for the new food to show an improvement. This is because traces of the old food stay in the digestive tract for several weeks. It can take up to three months for the hypoallergenic diet to really prove whether or not it’s working.
Full-mouth extractions are kind of a last-ditch effort; that said, it usually works great. 😕 In some cats, where other methods have failed to control the problem, they get to a point where they have very few teeth anyway and they’re in such bad shape that extractions make sense. But most vets will try very hard to avoid pulling the big canine (fang) teeth, because these teeth help support the jaw. Removing them can sometimes lead to a jaw fracture. And even if a cat has no teeth at all, he can still eat. Some cats insist on eating dry food, while others cheerfully take the opportunity to switch to canned.
Good luck! Please know that although Stoph’s problem is no fun and I’m really sorry he’s going through this, he is not alone. There are–sadly–quite a few cats who experience this disease in one form or another. 🙁 Hang in there, both of you!
I can’t add anything to what has already been said by Barrdwing, Rusti and ddvm. However, if that is a recent pic, Stoph certainly does look healthy–nice weight (doesn’t think she looks obese), shiney coat and bright eyes. Hopefully, that will assist your kitty during treatment from the vet. A lot of cats are already in failing health before their humans take them in for an examination. Hang in there, keschete.
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