Kidley Catton is ailing [View all]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I took him into the vet earlier this week for a blood workup, and the kidney tests were abnormal. This could explain his lethargy and water drinking and eagerness to sit in the bathtub and drink water from that tap. (His usual cat sitter noted that a cat her family had developed an attachment to the bath tub when it had kidney trouble.)

The vet wants him to have a urinalysis to check for bacteria, but I just haven't had a chance to take him in yet. I suspect that this is more than an infection, though, because the symptoms have been building for a few months. (The bath tub attraction started in October.)

Apparently he'll need a special diet if he proves to have kidney failure.

But there's more. As I noted before, he grooms only on one side (I use a wire brush and careful plucking to get rid of mats on the other side) and has been losing his hearing. He used to be right at the door whenever I came home (evidently he heard the key in the lock), but now, I walk in, and if he's in the living room, he looks up as if to say, "Where did you come from?" He no longer responds to the radio signal to wake me up. It's also hard to get his attention.

When I described these symptoms to my brother, who's an MD, he said that if he had a human patient who came in with rapid hearing loss and neglect of one side of his body, he'd suspect either a brain tumor or a minor stroke, or at least something wrong with the brain. There's apparently a weird syndrome that occurs in people with damage in one part of the brain that makes men shave on only one side of their face or women put make-up on or comb their hair on only one side.

The vet did not seem interested in these neurological symptoms.

So far, Kidley still enjoys his food and being brushed and getting exercise in the hallway (although he now walks instead of runs), and he still likes to get sideways hugs (he's never been a lap cat) while sitting on the arm of my chair.

But he's just not himself.

If my cousin (his previous owner, who found him when the owners before that abandoned him upon moving away) is correct, Kidley is now 9 years old. But I'm not sure how she knew his age. He may be older.