Nov 22 2008
I think my cat has asthma
Yesterday, our cat started coughing. She’s 10 years old, and she’s always had hairballs (despite being a shorthair calico) but this was different. In fact, it sounded almost exactly like my own phlem-y cough.
Luckily, my husband and I were home, and our kids were not. We’re all pretty attached to the cat, but as she is older than both of the boys, they’d be pretty devastated if she were to get sick.
Of course, as soon as we determined that she seemed to be otherwise okay (she did start purring loudly once she stopped coughing), we hit the internet for answers.
We only had a few minutes before we had to go pick up the boys from a friend’s house and then take them to see a movie, so we quickly typed “coughing cat” into Google.
We started reading about all of the different things the cough could be, and had to stop. Did we really want to think about our cat, which we’ve had longer than we’ve been married, having a lung tumor?
Which is the problem with the internet as a resource when your kids (or pets) are sick. On the one hand, it can be a valuable tool - you can see photos of chicken pox and compare them to the spots on your child’s body before rushing to the doctor. On the other hand, you can easily find out about every weird and scary disease that LOOKS like chicken pox.
This is what usually happens to me. I have an over-active imagination at the best of times, and my kids have a tendancy to whine about the weirdest ailments.
So they’ll complain that their hair hurts, I’ll look up “sore scalp” on the internet, and within five minutes, I’m convinced that they have some rare form of scabies.
In the case of our cat, I had to go back for a second opinion. After dropping my husband, the boys and their two friends off at the movie theatre, I came back home and hit Google again.
This time I typed “cat wet cough” in the search box, and found an interesting video on YouTube of a woman’s cat coughing. She’s taken the video to show the vet. It sounded exactly like our cat’s cough!
It turns out that the YouTube cat has asthma, and takes inhaled steroids to control it. I immediately hoped that cats and people take similar doses - our youngest son has asthma, too.
Now I just have to figure out how to fit the aero-chamber over her face. (I’m kidding - don’t call the SPCA!)
It did make me wonder, though - if some people’s asthma flares up because of cat dander, can cat asthma flare up because of people dander?
