My rescue cat is about 18 now. She went to the vets today for her vaccinations, health check and fur de-matting. She's in good nick according to the vet and her heart is strong. She's thin and deaf, but still goes around as usual and even plays with a bit of string given half the chance. She loves lying in front of the stove during the colder weather.
I've never had a cat this old before (my boys were killed on the road/went missing), so I don't know what to expect as she gets old and near the end of her naturals.
She gets a bit confused sometimes and calls loudly and can't hear us when we give reassurance, so we don't call to her anymore, but go and see her face to face instead and she settles down then.
Can you tell me about how your elderly cat's care needs change and what I should be prepared for as time goes on?
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Talk to me about your elderly cats
hiddenhome · 11/09/2014 17:23
Oh, thanks for thinking about my cat who went missing. It's been a year now 
I keep seeing his photos on my phone. I can't ever have another boy cat because I've lost them all. My girls never go anywhere other than the garden.
My old cat loves sitting in the sun and she lies on the window sill in the sun too. I'm getting her some arthritis glucosamine supplements from the vets as I think she's stiff and a bit sore perhaps.
I'm going to take her to the vets every six months for a check up from now on as she gets tartar build up in her teeth and I don't want her to get a sore mouth. The vet pulled a chunk of tartar off her back tooth today. She said she doesn't want her to go under GA for a full descale, but her other teeth aren't too bad anyway.
Wow, 25! That's an amazing age.
Do you know anything that might put a bit of weight on her? She likes Dreamies. I feed her Iams dry food and Purina Wet Pouches. I'd love her to gain some weight, she's skin and bone, but the vet wasn't too concerned. She's always been underweight, even when young.
Ours was much as you describe from about 18 up to her death at the age of 21. We are convinced she has some form of dementia - she certainly got confused, and being deaf would sit and yell until someone came to find her - and we had to teach the DC not to come up behind her and scare the living daylights out of her.
We fed her senior pouches which she seemed to find more digestible - she would throw up normal adult cat food. She liked to lie in the sun and would piddle round the garden. We had to restrict access to the house as she decided she couldn't be bothered to go out to go to the loo (or even go downstairs to a litter tray 
) but then her personal hygiene was never great by cat standards. She had to be brushed as she wasn't grooming properly either.
We finally took the decision to have her PTS when she was too wobbly on her legs to jump up onto chairs, and no longer wanted to go out and lie in the sun. She was clearly unhappy at that point and losing even more weight. If she had not been so plainly unhappy then I would have kept going.
Mine was 10 when I got her and is now 15. She was a big fat heffalump when she arrived, but I don't restrict her access to food any more because she's lost weight and the extra fur seems to be mostly saggy skin rather than rolls of fat. She's been strictly on senior pouches and biscuits for a while as the vet said they are better I think for kidneys as they get older.
She's lost a lot of muscle tone this last year and is having trouble jumping up and down off things, sometimes falling a bit or tripping herself up. She still does jump on my head bed several times a night and onto windowsills etc though, so it obviously isn't painful or uncomfortable enough to make her not want to see out of the windows. I have chairs under the windows so she doesn't have to jump the whole way at once. Can now feel all the bones in her bum, which used to be well covered in muscle and fat!
Vet said she seems to have a bit of arthritis in her back legs so I put a few drops of cod liver oil in her dinner.
She is absolutely adorable, she sprawls flirtatiously in front of me all the time to persuade me to cuddle her, she is so affectionate and cute.
"Talks" a lot, and says a big ecstatic sort of "Mmmm!" chirrup to tell me how good my cuddles are 
. Possibly getting a bit confused as she does yowl more often than she used to, sometimes has to be retrieved in the middle of the night from the next room for no apparent reason.
PS - if I had to give you one word of advice about having an elderly cat it would be HEAT. They love having a good heat source all year round. Seniorboy has arthritis so likes to stretch his old bones out in comfort and therefore has an electric blanket switched on in my bed for most of the year so that he can lie between heat on the bottom and the fleece throw on top. (No draughts.) He's there now, not quite snoring but darned close to it - certainly luxuriating.
Mine was 22 when she died. Similar experiences to other posters; she got very confused and yowly, usually in the hall where she was confronted by lots of doors - I think she simply forgot which one she should go through! She got more fussy with food, and her poos became very dried up, so I think she had a tendency towards dehydration (although she always had lots of water available, and seemed to drink a bit more as she got older). She enjoyed sitting on the sofa (in her latter years she had to be picked up to get there) and on sunny days sitting outside.
A couple of days before she died she went missing - I really think she knew her time was up, and took herself off to die. We found her, luckily, by contacting the local vets - she wasn't chipped, but some kind soul had picked her up and made an appt to get her checked out. I collected her from them before that; I would think that had they taken her, the vet would have had her PTS, and we would never have known what happened to her. She had wandered about half a mile from home and collapsed in the road. I took her home, she had a pretty reasonable (for her) tea, then she slept on her blanket in front of the window, and passed away the next evening. I am so glad she died at home, as it would have been heartbreaking had she not been found, and perhaps caught by a fox or run over, or something horrible.
She was with us before we had children, and they grew up with her (although she kept her distance when they were small!) I miss her, but I know she had a lovely long life
Seniorboy likes to be close and talks a lot but it's difficult to distinguish that from his previous behaviour given his character. He always gets that anyway because I work from home so am with him most of the time. (And he sleeps in bed with me so that makes him content at night.)
His arthritis is quite bad now but his vet is very good with meds so he's not in pain although I've definitely noticed that he's less active than he was even a year ago. I guess he's just gently fading.
A happy boy still though.
My elderly cat is 17. Her kidneys have started to go, and she has renal cat food, and some tablets to take every day. She only weighs 2.5 kg.
She sleeps on our bed all day, and on the sofa at night, and probably goes up and down stairs about a dozen times a day, either to eat, drink, or just go outside. She loves it when one of us is in the garden, she likes to follow us around. We keep a bowl of water in the bathroom for her. She likes to drink little and often.
She is still very sprightly. I saw her jump up onto a 5 foot fence recently, although she has stopped following me down the hill to the bus stop (thank god).
I'm pretty sure her hearing is starting to go, and she seems to feel the cold. I'm thinking of getting her a cat coat, but I'm not sure she'd appreciate it. Also she breathes pretty shallowly when deep in sleep. I watch to make sure she is still breathing. The other 2 cats defer to her, even though one is at least double her weight!
I think of her in old person terms;
Slight, and lost weight
Bit hard of hearing
Small appetite
In her own little world some of the time
Doesn't like the cold
Set in her ways
A bit demanding sometimes
I took her to the vets last week. She had a check up, blood tests, and I bought 60 tablets and some sachets of renal cat food. It cost just over 100 pounds 
Elderly cats can be expensive (but are lovely)
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