Cat Wellness - The Ins and Outs of Cat Wellness

Dr. Casie Lew Advanced Animal Care

With wellness exams, the first thing that we would look for is the behavior, if they're willing to come out of their carrier, or if they're maybe a little bit too scared. Something that I would look for is definitely how they behave. You see my cat Mushu, he loves pets. He doesn't mind being in the hospital. I know some kitties tend to mind a lot. The next step, I would look at their face and see if there's any discharge or anything like that. A lot of kitties tend to get really bad upper respiratory infections, and so that's also another thing.

Then I would also go ahead and look in his mouth and double check how his teeth are looking. He's not cooperating the best with me here, but that's definitely another thing that I would look for. Then I would also kind of palpate his tummy to see if there are any organs inside that are too big or too small, just an abnormal sizing, or if there's any fluid in there. Typically, with annual wellnesses, a lot of these kitties tend to be very healthy and are able to get vaccines and go home.

Typically for an annual wellness exam, I would love to be able to draw some blood from the kitty and get some blood work done, but we would also love to get a fecal so that we can check for any internal parasites. Those would be my top two choices for lab work.

The best thing to do would be to get an annual wellness. Each annual wellness that we do, as vets we're able to see the progression of the animal and see whether or not they're sick, or if something has changed, especially in the lab work. We're able to objectively see whether or not things have gotten worse or maybe even gotten better if they've suffered from a previous illness.

Usually, for a lot of kitties, you have a very, very hard time seeing whether or not they're sick, but some of the things that you can see would be hiding, or if they don't feel well enough to eat, don't feel well enough to drink water. Sometimes kitties, like I said earlier before that have upper respiratory infections, tend to have really watery discharge from the eyes and the nose.

Early detection allows us to treat the animal a lot easier or a lot better than if they were sick for a long time. It helps us treat the animal when they are relatively healthy enough in order to fight the disease themselves as well.

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