Meet Lala!
She is Chrissy’s cat, our part-time client care coordinator.
Lala is a 3 year old DSH (domestic short hair) that Chrissy found as a stray in her neighborhood around 6 months of age. She came in last months for her routine annual physical exam and we found significant dental disease and the need for a cleaning with extractions quite likely. We preformed pre-surgical lab work to be sure she was healthy and a good candidate for anesthesia and we found that she had some struvite crystals in her urine. So, mom was BUSTED, and will no longer be giving junky cat teats!
Lala did great and recovered from her dental procedure without a hitch! She is now eating prescription urinary foods too and this will dissolve her urinary crystals which can lead to painful urination and elimination outside the box. So often if cats are not symptomatic this is not addressed, but at our office, any amount of crystals are too many crystals because one must consider that ever animal’s threshold for pain is different and we should not assume she does not feel discomfort just because she was still using her litter box! And, the goal is to keep her using her litter box! An incidental finding that still requires addressing in our opinion!
The point is that we do not always know "what lies beneath" or what is brewing in the early stages of disease that we can get ahead of if we knew it was happening!
The next time you brush off your cat’s annual visit and think to yourself, "Oh, they're fine." Just remember it is easier, less stressful and often less expensive to catch things early. Cats are the "Masters of disguise" after all and without diagnostics we would often never know #whatliesbeneath
