Update on Stella

Stella seems always hungry and has a heavy paw to protect her food bowl.

It’s been awhile since we’ve discussed Stella. As you may remember, Stella came to us with an inflamed, swollen nose, thought to be cancerous and a large polyp in her left ear. She was bedraggled, skeletal and listless. We sent her off to the vet, then arranged for an operation and a couple of biopsies. Her blood work was horrible. Her nose was merely badly inflamed; her left ear, on the other hand, was filled with a cancerous tumor. The removal of the polyp seems to have cured that problem (we’ll see over time), but the thinness refused to get better, no matter how much she ate. We ran blood work for her thyroid and it came back as critically overactive, requiring methimazole.

The methimazole works on humans as well as cats so gloves are need

Stella has been receiving two doses a day (morning & evening, alternating ears) for almost a month now and as her pictures show, she is a much improved kitty. When dealing with thyroid issues, change takes quite a while, with weight being about the last thing that catches up. She needs to put on maybe three or four more pounds to be “healthy”, but we’re delighted to already see such improvement.

Stella is more or less confined to my office, where she spends time with Linus, Cookie, Toby and Mama Harlequin. I normally watch TV and fend the cats off my dinner in my office every evening and that makes for some great socialization time. Linus and Stella are rivals for my lap when I’m at the TV or reading. One will get in my lap and be petted for an hour or so and then they’ll switch. It’s interesting to watch when Linus gets up to nibble at the dry cat food, Stella slides into my lap without a second glance at her large, orange friend.

Finders, keepers.