Changing it up

Well, naturally everything has gotten much much worse since that last post. I am mostly writing this as a record for myself (and others googling cat epilepsy?) so sorry, people who aren't interested. But here is a picture of Banana. 

Thursday night he fell apart again with the crazy overgrooming and scratching of  his feet and entire head. By Friday morning his right eye was half shut from scrabbling at his temple. 

It occurred to me that we started a new food less than 2 weeks before this all started with his seizures on May 5th. We had them on Royal Canin Urinary SO Moderate Calorie, and then I switched them to the regular because my vet didn't have the low cal. I did some research and discovered the primary symptom of food allergies in cats is itching, especially of the face and ears. And food allergies can also cause seizures. And soy is a common allergen, present in the regular version of that food but not in anything he had ever eaten prior. So THAT is all very interesting. The first thing I did Friday morning was call my vet, who said she would put in a call to the neurologist to see if he had other cats with this problem. Then I went and got the Moderate Calorie food and took away the other stuff. 

I took the afternoon off work and when I got home at 1:30 he was still a twitchy disaster. Finally I talked to the vet, who said the neurologist didn't think the phenobarb was causing the itching, but she disagreed and thinks we should taper off the phenobarb and switch to a new medication called Keppra. I agreed 100% with this plan. She called in Keppra to the pharmacy and I picked it up and it was $115 for a month's supply and the pills were enormous, far too big to give to a cat. SIGH. 

I drove to the vet's office to show her the pills and she agreed they were ridiculous and that I should return them. We talked about it and agreed to start decreasing his phenobarb immediately regardless as clearly he is not tolerating it well. Compounding pharmacies can turn Keppra into treat-like form, so she is going to call on Monday and see how much that costs. She's worried it will be expensive but at this point I do not care. We don't have kids; what else are we going to spend our money on? She gave me some sample treat flavors to see if he likes one more than the other and THANK GOD he loves them all. It's going to be much more awesome giving him a treat 3 times a day as opposed to shoving a pill down his throat. 

So after all that I went home and Banana was relaxed and affectionate all evening like nothing had even happened. ARGHGH. That makes me wonder about the food, though - maybe I really am onto something there. We are decreasing the phenobarb anyway because clearly it isn't doing a good job of controlling his symptoms regardless, and it also makes him pathetically clumsy and is hard on the liver long-term. 

This morning he purred and cuddled with me for hours. He did have a moderately compulsive grooming session this afternoon and sort of half-heartedly scratched in the direction of his head, but we were able to ward it off for the most part and it was nothing like the horribleness of the last few days. 

So we will see! This has been an incredible learning experience and I think it is far from over, which sometimes I am fine with and sometimes makes me want to cry. Once we get him stable I'm semi-seriously thinking of starting a feline epilepsy website because it is so difficult to find information about this stuff. Even my vet is learning a lot, I think. It's just a super rare condition. We sure are lucky.