I gave my one and a half year old cat Metacam last summer when she developed an unexplained limp that the vet couldn’t diagnose and that lingered for several months. She prescribed Metacam, with no mention of side effects to kidneys, maximum dosage, proper administration of it (not a word was said about putting it food). My red flag should have been that I was actually asked to sign a WAIVER before they gave me the medication because it had only been tested extensively on dogs (in other words, the vet community couldn’t say for sure how it would effect cats, they only had anecdotal evidence). Long story short, by Thanksgiving my sweetheart of a cat was dead from massive kidney failure - the ER vet I took her to said she had the kidneys of a 17-year-old cat. At first I thought she was just a victim of poor health from the start, since she was a stray who had been abandoned by her mother at 3 weeks old. Later, I blamed myself for habitually letting her chew on the leaves of one of my plants (a peace lilly - can be poisonous to cats but usually they become symptomatic quickly and she had been doing this for many months). I don’t know for sure if the Metacam was responsible, but last month a friend of mine put her older cat on Metacam for arthritis and the cat went into kidney failure very shortly afterwards. That was the first I heard of the connection between kidney failure and Metacam. I will never know what the decisive factor was in my young cat’s death - there may have been several - but I do know that I will NEVER use this drug again for any other cat I have. I also got rid of my plants.

    Good luck to all cat owners with pets prescribed this drug - if you still decide to use the Metacam, PLEASE check your cat’s kidneys BEFORE and AFTER administering it for your own peace of mind and better understanding of the risk factors for the cat.

 

    Maria