Rocky and Rolie

I just wanted to make contact with a fellow sufferer - this week we have lost two of our three beloved cats to what the vet believes to have been antifreeze poisoning.  The first was Rocky who was almost twelve years old and spent 22 hours out of every 24 sleeping on my fifteen year old son\'s bed.  He was a big softie, all 8kg of him and was well known in the neighbourhood.  He became ill last Wednesday when he began vomiting and staggered around, and we rushed him to the vet, who was unsure what the problem was and asked us to bring him back the next day.  By then he was worse, and after having a blockage of crystals removed from his urethra and a catheter inserted, he was put on a drip and hospitalised.  The words "antifreeze poisoning" were mentioned but never seriously considered.  Rocky didn't get any better and died four days later. 

The day before his death, our baby cat Rolie, two years old, started showing the same symptoms - vomiting accompanied by staggering.  We immediately feared that they must both have certainly been poisoned, and rushed Rolie to the emergency vet.  She was examined, but the vet could find nothing clinically wrong.  Our minds were put at rest since she did seem to be a little better. But by the next morning she had become worse, and we took her to our own vet (who at the same time informed me that Rocky had died during the night.)  He decided to hospitalise Rolie for observation only, since he was still unsure what the problem was with both of them.  We in the meantime had been doing lots of investigation on the internet about antifreeze poisoning, and were coming more and more to the conclusion that they had both ingested it.  Perhaps we should have pressed the vet for a speedier response to Rolie\'s situation, but we tend to be of the opinion that the professionals know best. Two days after our initial consultation with the emergency vet, our own vet finally did a blood test, only to confirm our worst fears that Rolie\'s kidneys were not working at all.  I made the painful decision that because death seemed inevitable, it would be best to put her to sleep to put an end to her suffering.  We and our three children are all devastated at losing Rocky and Rolie - our remaining cat Rosie also seems puzzled and spends a lot of time looking out of the windows and sniffing around the garden.  
I, like yourselves, feel compelled to do something to alert people to the dangers of antifreeze. I have added my name to the petition and have e-mailed the link to everyone I know to collect more signatures.  I also intend to use some of the info on your web-pages, spliced together with our own story, to produce a leaflet to distribute around the area where we live, and have contacted our local newspaper to see whether they would run an article about the dangers of antifreeze.  I wonder too, whether vets could benefit from education into the symptoms of antifreeze poisoning, and the fact that an animal\'s life could be saved if they act quickly enough.  I believe there is a test that can be done, and an antidote available?  But as they say, prevention is better than cure. 
I want it to be known that despite my comments about our vets being slow to diagnose the poisoning and our resulting frustration, we in no way blame the vets for our cats’ deaths.  I realise that unless the animal has been seen to drink the antifreeze, it’s almost impossible for any vet to take appropriate action within those vital first few hours.   In fact, if our second cat hadn’t happened to have been taken ill, I think we would have all put Rocky’s death down to acute organ failure due to some other factor, perhaps weak heart, given that he was so overweight. 

Thank you for setting up this web-site - it has given me great comfort to think that we are not alone in our grief, and that someone else is also trying to do something to prevent antifreeze poisoning happening at all.

Sue Rygate