I can’t tell you how happy we are all at how well Corey has been doing this past month.
His appetite is great, he continues to gain weight and he no longer has diarrhea.
We even think that his hearing may be improving.
We can’t be certain of this, as it is difficult to accurately test a cat’s hearing and cats are very good at using their other senses.
But most of the employees have commented that Corey appears to “notice” when someone enters the room.

And, there is more good news to report on Corey.

Last month, I told you that our vet had detected a heart murmur during one of Corey’s exams and we would be scheduling an ultrasound to determine whether he had heart disease.
Well, Corey had his ultrasound recently and received good news: the vet said that his heart was only very slightly enlarged and that Corey needed no medicine and that he didn’t think this would cause Corey any problems.

When the vet was done with the ultrasound on Corey’s chest, we asked him to “look” into Corey’s abdomen to see if he could tell us anything about the source of Corey’s original GI problems.
While his horrible diarrhea has disappeared, we were concerned that there was an underlying problem that could recur.
Our biggest fear was cancer, most likeley lymphoma, given Corey’s age.

The vet doing the ultrasound determined that Corey had IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease).
IBD is the name for a group of auto-immune diseases that cause inflammation of the colon or bowels.
Now, IBD is still a serious disease and it can be quite painful and difficult to control.
And, while the ultrasound can’t completely rule out cancer, we would much rather have IBD to deal with than lymphoma.
So, all told, we are happy withn the results of the ultrasound.

Since Corey has been doing so well, our vet has started to taper his prednisone dosage.
So far he is doing well and we are hpoepful that we will soon be able to only resort to steroids if his IBD flares up.
Often times, IBD can be well controlled with a proper diet, so this month we will be trying some IBD-friendly diets on Corey.
We will report on our preliminary results during next month’s updates.

I know that you must be as happy as we are about Corey’s excellent progress.
Thanks so much for caring about Corey and sponsoring him.