Bad Pet Mama
May 7th, 2008 by Laura
Sometimes life gets so busy that it’s easy to miss the little details.
About 5 weeks after we moved Sterling (our 11 year old cat) started peeing in the closest where his litter box was. Not in the box, but on the carpet near it. He hasn’t used a litter box regularly for years, preferring to go outside, but with the move he’d decided to be more of an indoor cat and I was humoring him. I thought it was because I’d bought a different litter trying to be eco-friendly. So on my way out the door to go to Vegas I asked Mike to go buy some Tidy Cat and some Nature’s Miracle. I assumed that that would fix it.
Nope. He proceeded to keep peeing in the closest, so I moved his litter box from the closest in my home office to under the desk. Not an ideal spot, but I figured that he’d start going outside again when the weather got nicer. Then he started peeing under the other half of my L-shaped desk. I locked him out of the office and moved his box onto the tile in the bathroom. I thought, okay problem solved. And it was, for about 4 days.
In the meantime I remembered that years ago when we lived in an apartment we’d had this problem and it turned out that he had a urinary tract infection. So just in case I made him a vet appointment for today. By this morning we’d been pee-on-carpet free for several days and I almost canceled the appointment. Then he peed in the hallway while I was getting dressed and I caught him. Bad cat!
So off to the vet we went this afternoon. Turns out that poor Sterling has another raging UTI, likely brought on by the stress of moving. And he’s been suffering for almost a month. Poor baby! Bad pet mama!
Luckily he’s now on big doses of antibiotics for 10 days and an anti-inflammatory for the next few days. Hopefully he’ll feel better soon. Now we just have to get the last of the cat pee out of the carpet…
i couldn’t NOT comment on your post this morning - i have two male cats that have chronic UTI’s and thought I might be able to help you out a bit. both of our cats are on CD formula food - the jury’s out on whether or not it helps or not, but after one cat having a minimum of 6 UTI’s in probably, 6 months…we haven’t stopped using it. we also give him a supplement - it’s called Veterinarian’s Best Urinary Track - it comes in tablets that you can break into pieces. Our very finicky cat loves them - when his UTI’s were constant, we were giving him two a day - now we’re giving him one. and between the combo of special diet and the supplement we haven’t *knock on wood* had any problems since. our other cat just eats the special food and has been great. you can get the food at your vet IF they recommend that rt, you can get the supplement at petco/petsmart/online. Good Luck! hope i was able to help.
AW! Poor kitty!
It’s the worst feeling when stuff like that happens! But it does happen and it doesn’t make you a bad pet mom.