Mac's Mystery

TLDR; My one-year-old cat, Mac, is a medical mystery, and we need help to try and finally get some answers. He is seemingly starving himself to death, and no vet can figure out why. He’s not in pain or otherwise suffering and vets have said he all-around appears to be a healthy cat. I can’t pull myself to make a decision on whether he lives or not based on money, so please consider helping Mac and I with the next batch of tests.

Hi, my name is Sam and I'm fundraising for my furbaby Mac, hoping to find an answer so that I can give him many more spoiled years of life.

The Background

For as long as I can remember, I have loved cats. I have been the crazy cat lady before being a crazy cat lady became quirky and cool. I have an “I love my cat” bumper sticker. On Saturdays, I am the girl at the pet store getting my cats new toys for “Caturday”. Cats are my life. I even almost went to college to study big cats. Forever I had wanted an orange cat, but I felt strongly about only adopting a cat in need of a home, and the stars just weren’t aligning. Don’t get me wrong – I have two other cats that I love and look after like they are my children – but an Orange Cat™ for some reason was my dream, ask my friends and family.

Things finally fell into place last year, and at the time, the new kitten was something to be excited about in the midst of the hardest year of my life. I don’t mean to use this as an opportunity to dump my grief onto the internet, but the rest of this makes more sense if you understand that I brought Mac home as a kitten a few weeks before my mom died. My mom was 51 years old when she died, and she never got to meet him. She did get a kick out of his name – Macaroni and Cheese. Mac, for short, and enjoyed seeing his photos. She was an avid cat lover. We loved to talk about all the different cat welfare influencers we followed on Instagram and their current batches of fosters, and we’d share cat pictures and memes back and forth. Our last text and Instagram messages, both about cats. I like to think that’s where I got my love of cats from.

When I first took him home, he had an upper respiratory infection (your boy had herpes), typical feral kitten. Taking care of him gave me someone to nurture. Brainstorming names for him gave me something to think and laugh about when I was worried about my mom. Mac gave me something to smile about when I got home from running around and making hard decisions.

In true cat-mom fashion, I did a kitten photoshoot (scroll down to see Macaroni in a Pot), and tried in earnest to figure out which of all the toys the pet store had to offer was his favorite (a rainbow caterpillar string toy), and what treats were his favorite (Churu tubes, a rogue bug in the house, or some fresh catnip – depending on his mood). I was well on the way to taking him from a feral barn kitten to the spoiled house cat he deserved to be.

The Problem

Then, when he was around ten months old, I noticed he started losing weight. I ran every test that my primary vet could think of, but nothing was abnormal. My vet eventually thought that it might be FIP, which is a disease that is notoriously unreliable to test for, and does not have a good prognosis. I started him on treatment for that – which involved administering an injection every day. This treatment is known to have a rapid response and a high success rate. After ten days there was no change, and he was still losing weight.

He went from a twelve-pound healthy kitten to a seven-pound skeleton in a matter of a few months.

After ultrasounds, x-rays, and even more bloodwork showed nothing, I saw two internal medicine specialists in the same day. Each suggested a number of tests, and I had them perform them all. Again nothing conclusive.

Both specialists thought it might be his teeth, so I brought him to a veterinary dentist to look at his teeth, and she, and several of her colleagues looked at him and confirmed it sadly was definitely not his teeth.

By June, he had lost half of his body weight. With that amount of weight loss, his organs were at risk of shutting down. One of the specialists suggested that I put a feeding tube in, so I did. I made schedules and charts, and sent emails to my boss, and restructured my life and sleep schedule so that I could tube feed him every four hours. 9 days later, he ripped out said feeding tube. The vet performed another surgery to put it back in.

Eventually, I was able to transition to feeding him every six hours and have been doing that now since mid-June. With the help of the feeding tube he has gained back over two pounds and looks much healthier! See before and current picture below.

But the feeding tube was a Band-Aid, not a fix. They still did not know what was wrong with him. The dental specialist in Boston had told their internal medicine team about Mac’s case, and they suggested performing a swallow study to see if there was something wrong there. They were very hopeful that would show an abnormality, and this would be our answer. I took the day off from work, and so did my Dad (thank you Dad), to drive to Boston and have the procedure performed. Sadly he passed with flying colors and swallowed just fine, and we are now back to the drawing board. The IM specialist told me that Mac is a “once in every five years” case.

One test has turned into another and another, and at this point, I have spent over $10,000.00 trying to find out what is wrong with my boy. My primary vet told me about some grants that I could try and apply for to help with his vet bills, but after looking into them, most, if not all, of the grants require the applicant to have a diagnosis for their pet. Sadly I don't yet have that; that's the whole problem.

Throughout this process, I have been amazed at the kindness of the veterinarians that have helped us. They genuinely care and are trying everything that they can think of to help Mac. I have missed work, opened credit cards, lost sleep, and paid for every test that vets have suggested.

I have learned A LOT about veterinary medicine at this point, and one of the most striking things I’ve discovered is that the science for feline research is about fifteen years behind that of dogs. I can’t help but think that the answer is out there, but the vets just haven’t had enough people get this far in treatment to learn what that answer is.

The Ask

The thing is, Mac is not suffering. This is not a “pay X amount now, and your cat will be ok” type of case, and I think that is why it has been so hard. There isn’t a defined issue yet, so it isn’t clear yet what the fix will be. That means, every time I decide on whether to do a procedure for my one-year-old cat, I am not sure if this procedure will be the one that finds something. The one that provides an answer, defines what the ‘fix’ is (or isn’t), and potentially gives him 15+ more years of lounging on his Catio and playing with stuffing-less dog toys.

The thing is, I am not sure if the next procedure will be the one that gives the vets some answers in this “once in five years” case, and in the future may help them diagnose someone else’s best friend $10,000.00 sooner than they did Mac.

But the thing is, Mac and I need help.

I have put off posting this for so long, because I kept thinking I could handle it on my own… but I can’t.

I am a cat mom, and an animal lover. Our pets do so much every day to make our lives more worth living, and I know that Mac has done that for me. I am at the point where the decisions that I make about his care – about whether he gets a chance at the rest of his life – is governed by money, and I absolutely hate that. He deserves a chance, and I am not too proud to ask you to help me give that to him, and to hopefully give the eleven (11) different vets that I have worked with some answers, so that they can help someone else’s best friend in the future too.

The recommended next step is an endoscopy and a CAT scan (I wish this were just a pun), which will cost approximately $5,000.00. The vets are upfront that this too may find nothing, but these are some of the only tests left to run and they are hopeful they will come back with something. Please consider helping us be able to run these tests and hopefully finally solve Mac’s mystery.