I've had a few inquiries into how Nakita is doing so thought I'd post an update.
For those not familiar with the story, Nakita started pulling the fur from her chest, scratching her ears and throwing up every day (about 1 tbsp of bile, only in the early morning hours). The vet thinks she may have food allergies and possible IBD (this is in addition to the feline hyperesthesia she currently exhibits). The vet placed her on short term Prednisone to give her body a chance to rest while the new food has a chance to take effect.
Nakita has now been on Prednisone for 3 weeks. First week - 1/2 pill daily, second week - 1/4 pill daily, third week - 1/4 pill every other day. She started to throw up again right after we went back down to 1/4 pill every other day.
We went back to the vet last week and we're going to see how she does on 1/4 pill every day.
We're also changing her food to rabbit and pea instead of duck and rice. Nakita may be allergic to rice and I wanted to avoid that as a final diet measure. Plus, I'm not sure if the Prednisone or the food or a combo of the two is causing her to be constipated.
We're also changing her litter from Swheat Scoop to another to see if that might make a difference. We started using Swheat Scoop around the same time that vomiting and itching started, so we're now changing that final variable as well. Other than that, we use no toxic cleaners, only have hard wood for flooring and we do not use any flea medications. We also have held off on vaccinations to see if that was a source of the problems.
As long as everything goes ok with the new pill dosage , we're going to wait a month and then go for allergy testing. It's a new test the vet just started using that looks promising. It's fairly inexpensive and only requires a blood sample, so we'll try that. If that doesn't work, we may have to go through the alternative testing, where they shave a patch of fur off her stomach and do the scraping allergy test (like in humans), but that requires Nakita to be under anaesthetic which I'd like to avoid right now.
Keep your fingers crossed that we'll get to the bottom of this and Nakita will be her old self again.
~Kass
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