When Simcoe was diagnosed with Chronic Renal Failure (CRF) they also identified a badly infected tooth that needed to be cared for.
She’s now been through a number of tests and since we decided to hold off on the kidney transplant for now we went ahead and scheduled her dental work. We picked up some antibiotics last week and had been giving them to her since Saturday. Unfortunately they caused her to vomit twice, which we reported when we dropped her off at 8:30AM this morning.
We were all pretty apprehensive about the dental work, and I was worried about her all day. Fortunately her vet has been really great and worked with the anesthesiologist to make sure she was given as little sedation as possible to make it through. With renal cats there is always a major worry about uncontrollable blood pressure drop during procedures, which can be fatal. They also decided to take some x-rays during the procedure and do a full cleaning to reduce the chances that we’d need to bring her in again for dental work in the near future.
Around 3PM I got the call from the vet letting us know she was waking up and doing ok. Hooray!
The infected tooth ended up being worse than they thought, with the tooth showing severe infection but the roots remaining buried deep in her jaw so it took a considerable amount of work to get everything out. Fortunately the x-rays showed no more damaged teeth, and aside from a drop in blood pressure that was controlled with fluid treatment she did well through the procedure.
They sent her home with a new form of antibiotics that we hope will be easier on her stomach. She’s also on Buprenorphine for three days to handle pain from the extracted tooth.
We picked up a prescription for her Lactated Ringer’s solution and the needles to go with it as we’ll be continuing the subcutaneous injections every other day, I’ll head over to the pharmacy tomorrow to place the order for the first case.
The next vet visit is 10 days from now as a routine follow-up to the dental work.
She’s clearly in pain tonight, very restless, but she’s been trying to eat and drink so we’re hopeful she’ll recover quickly.
Tuesday, Jan 17th, 2012 at 8:58
What a beautiful cat! I think she is lucky to have parents who take good care of her!
Wednesday, Jan 18th, 2012 at 1:38
poor kitty :( hope she feels better.
Tuesday, Jan 24th, 2012 at 14:25
How is Simcoe doing now, for those like myself who’ve been following the reporting of your poor kitty’s suffering :-( and treatments here over the last few weeks or so??? And especially, What do the vets say is her long-term prognosis?
Tuesday, Jan 24th, 2012 at 23:30
She really hated the antibiotics we had her on post dental work, but those finished yesterday and I think her mouth has healed ok. We’ll be going in on Thursday for a standard follow-up visit to confirm that everything looks good.
Long term prognosis is not good. We’re looking at, on the high end, just a few years of life without a kidney transplant, during which time complications of the kidney failure will start seriously impacting her quality of life. We fully expect to need to go down the transplant route at some point, but for now her levels are staying low enough that we’re not ready to take the risk. We’ll take her in for more blood work in a month or so and then get it rechecked at least quarterly moving forward.