Cleo playing with a mouse cat toy while recovering from feline hepatic lipidosis

About three and a half years ago now, one of my cats, Cleo, became sick with fatty liver disease, also known as feline hepatic lipidosis.  It turns out that when we got a dog, she stopped eating because she was afraid to go to her dish.  Cats livers aren’t made to process fat stores, so basically her liver got bogged down with fat and stopped working.  This condition makes the cat feel sick, so even though they need to eat to get better, they won’t.

Luckily, this is a very curable form of liver failure, and simply requires a month or two of force feeding the cat a high protein diet in order to jump start the liver again.  For Cleo it took about four weeks, but it was a rough four weeks.  She threw up a lot and there were many times when I was afraid she wouldn’t make it.

In the beginning, I decided to buy her some cat toys to try to tempt her into playing.  We had her sectioned off in the second bedroom with a baby gate so that the dog couldn’t bother her while she was recovering, but even so, at first all she did was to hide all the time.  As she started feeling better, though, she was often bored and lonely when we couldn’t be in there with her, so she seemed to appreciate the cat toys.  It certainly made me feel good, too, to see her acting like herself again!

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