Elwin (Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada) on 08/31/2009
Replied By James (Orange, Us) on 12/05/2010
My healthy lean male cat of 3 years started showing signs of serious bladder blockage just a few days ago. We have fed him a mix of newman's own organic cat food half dry/ half wet, but he is a crunchy food addict so would eat mostly the dry and only the wet when really hungry. He was lean and healthy so we didn't worry much about this then. He also doesn't seem to drink from his water bowl all that often. He started acting really lethargic and then noticed him doing the litterbox dance, going in and out without peeing much if at all, this was at night and our vet was closed. I did research online and worried about the dangers of full blockage and the need to take the cat in asap, but the emergency vet charges big markups, so we decided to wait til morning for our regular vet as long as he continued to show signs of at least getting a few drops of urine out on most of his litterbox trips.
We also started giving him oral doses of diluted raw apple cider vinegar mixed with a "d-mannose" supplement every few hours using one of those plastic syringe squirter things you can get at a pharmacy. I had read many testimonials online about people having success with this issue by supplementing the vinegar, seemingly as it would help to quickly drop the urine ph. The "d-mannose" is the main ingredient in cranberry juice that helps with uti, and thought that if he had any bacterial uti issues this would help and couldn't hurt.
So to be safe I stayed up all night observing him and giving him the doses every few hours and in the morning just before we were to take him into the vet we noticed he went to the litterbox and had a noticeably larger urine amount which was a relief so we decided to hold off on the vet and keep up the doses. We also cut out dry food and gave him wet food with broth or distilled water and microwaved it a little so it was a little warm, he lapped up the broth and ate a little, towards the of the evening he started peeing larger and larger amounts and started to regain his energy and playfulness and didn't seem to be in discomfort anymore.
The next day he seemed fully back to normal, though we are continuing to give him one dose of Apple Cider Vinegar and d-mannose and will continue to give him only wet food with added water or broth heating it up slightly as he seems to prefer. If most of these bladder blockage problems are caused by dry food and grain causing higher pH than ideal in the urine it makes sense that the apple cider vinegar supplement would help by quickly lowering the pH in the urine. Plus it is super cheap, and so far has worked a miracle for us. You can google this remedy to find out more.
Our dose was 1/4 teaspoon acv(vinegar) mixed with 1 teaspoon distilled water with 1/8 teaspoon "d-mannose" powder per dose. To give it orally my gf or myself would hold the cat and lift his scruff so he couldn't move his head much while the other person would squirt the liquid in the back of his mouth. Now that he is back to full energy this is getting harder as he resists more so I decided to squirt it and lightly rub it in on his side when he was laying down cleaning himself and he happily lapped it up. Worth a try especially for those who are worried about huge vet bills.
Replied By Spice\'s Mom (Cape Coral, Fl) on 12/28/2010
Replied By Vinnie (Auckland, New Zealand) on 02/14/2011
Did not know anything about ACV before finding this page, wasnt even sure if you could get this 'mother' stuff here in Aotearoa New Zealand, but yay, yes I can. So have just bought some and will get started now - so good luck to us, and thankyou thankyou to all the people who take the time to post here! Kia ora.