Diary of A Fat Cat: Labwork Surprise!

Moment of truth. Time to take Puck in for his annual torture session, er, um, I mean,  car trip. Actually he isn’t bad in the car.  Puck is a well traveled cat, he’s moved with me from Washington to California and then back up to Oregon. You could say he’s been down this road (and that one) before.  His least favorite part is being stuck in a kennel all day while I work — he hides under blankies and pretends he is an empty kennel.

Since Puck is still dropping weight, and he just became a senior kitty, I decided to run labs on him.  The labs are designed to be a diagnostic tool to evaluate overall health including organ function and metabolism.  I wasn’t expecting any problems to show up, after all his continued weight loss was due to dieting.

Imagine my surprise when the lab work came back showing that he had crystals in his urine. The kind that can create urinary blockages in male cats, or turn into bladder stones — ouch!

Struvite crystal formation has nothing to do with weight loss.  But the easy solution for dealing with urinary crystals is to increase the patient’s water consumption.  And the easiest was to do that is to change to canned food.

Guess what kind of food is best for weight loss? You betcha, any type of canned food!  Canned food has not only higher water, but lower calories, higher protein, and is more satisfying for carnivores.  Now we just have to convince Puck that canned food is food. He likes it about as a kid likes Brussels sprouts or lima beans.  I have to feed him something (not eating is a serious problem in hefty kitties) while he turns his nose up at the mushy stinky foodstuffs before him.  We decide that Royal Canin’s prescription diet, Urinary SO, is the one to try. Except he has to eat 3 times what I’ve been feeding him to get the same amount of calories.

Stay tuned … there’s more to this story!

Cara (and Puck)