It was probably a true reflection of reality. Our dogs regularly sprinted around Brooklyn's Prospect Park, traded bacteria for playmates and scarfed illicit chicken bones.
Now I think we may have missed the signs of a cat's illness. When we took the olives to the vet, we were worried that we were overreacting. In fact, she was seriously ill.
Certainly, cats have the talent to hide symptoms, but it can exist in a different way than dog symptoms, experts told me. Dogs with arthritis often develop prominent paws, which are easily spotted on walks, but many cats with arthritis show no obvious signs of la bullets, Dr. Perry said. They may just jump to the couch frequently or look gross when processed.
“It's much easier to not notice that your cat is slowly changing over time, given that your cat is sleeping for hours a day and owners generally only sleep around them for those few hours,” Dr. Perry said.
Looking back, the olives seemed to have been quietly decreasing for several weeks.
Ultimately, the vet concluded that her immune system was destroying red blood cells. But they couldn't say what caused it, nor could they find the medicine that helped. Finally, as a last resort, the physician suggested that she could consider removing the huge spleen of olive, which was probably where her red blood cells were being destroyed.
I emailed another vet a second opinion. “Splenectomy is not the worst option,” she wrote back, describing it as an established treatment for human patients with similar conditions. “We don't have veterinary medical data,” she added. “Especially with cats.”
