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Pbinky is going to the Cardiologist tomorrow.

Pbinky

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I made an appointment for my boy whose a year and a half. i'm pretty sure they will run an echo as they asked me to have him fasted for the appointment. (nothing to eat after midnight tonight and his appointment is at 10am tomorrow morning). I was just wondering if anyone knew whether or not a cat will show signs of HCM in an echo even if the cat is perfectly healthy and is not showing any symptoms of being sick?? Pbinky, to my knowledge, is perfectly healthy but because of everything i've read here and the fact that the breeder never responded to my email a few weeks ago asking whether or not he scans his cats for HCM, i've become increasingly concerned for the health of my cats. My other baby is almost 11 months and i guess i'll be taking him in the next 7 months or so...
I just wanted to know if anything is wrong with Pbinky, will they be able to detect it even so he is perfectly healthy or seems to be anyway...???
i'm a nervous wreck.:Sweat:
 

gizmo6370

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There is an agresive form of hcm...that shows on an early age ( from 6 months to 1 year old ) but i guess if that is the case....your cat should be showing any symptoms (spelling ?)
Although you gotta keep in mind....if he scans negative now....he can scan positive in 3 or 4 years...there are sadly enough....no garantuees ( spelling again ? )
Pbinky is healthy so you say...so i think he's just gonna be fine :Wink:
So try not to worry to much ( i know...eassier said then done ) keeping fingers and paws crossed for a negative scan :ThumbsUp:
 

Brooke

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I made an appointment for my boy whose a year and a half. i'm pretty sure they will run an echo as they asked me to have him fasted for the appointment. (nothing to eat after midnight tonight and his appointment is at 10am tomorrow morning). I was just wondering if anyone knew whether or not a cat will show signs of HCM in an echo even if the cat is perfectly healthy and is not showing any symptoms of being sick?? Pbinky, to my knowledge, is perfectly healthy but because of everything i've read here and the fact that the breeder never responded to my email a few weeks ago asking whether or not he scans his cats for HCM, i've become increasingly concerned for the health of my cats. My other baby is almost 11 months and i guess i'll be taking him in the next 7 months or so...
I just wanted to know if anything is wrong with Pbinky, will they be able to detect it even so he is perfectly healthy or seems to be anyway...???
i'm a nervous wreck.:Sweat:

If there is anything wrong with his heart right now, they will be able to detect it on the echo - yes, even if there are no outward signs. HCM can go for many years and show no outward signs...this is how so many people are surprised when they find their cats dead and had no idea anything was wrong - cats are so very good at hiding illness. By the time there are symptoms, the disease is usually quite severe and there isn't a lot of time left.

Like gizmo said, the echo is only a picture of how his heart looks right now. So, you should repeat the scan later to make sure there aren't any changes. The cardiologist will make a recommendation on when to repeat the scan. If it looks good, they will usually recommend coming back in one year. If there is anything suspicious, they may recommend a rescan in 6 months. A clear scan tomorrow is no guarantee of a clear scan next year (look at the case with my Nelson, for example, or Mews2much's friends cat who scanned clear in 2007 but just passed away).

I'm sorry you never heard back from the breeder. That's not cool. But, I am so proud of you for being an advocate for your kitty's heart health. My fingers are crossed for a clear scan tomorrow!!! I have faith everything will be okay. :ThumbsUp:
 

susi794

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My gang all send their love and prayers for nothing but good news! I will be praying that all is well.
Susi and the gang.
00000000000000000000000 (That was from Boo--LOL--it means have a negative scan!)
 

admin

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Hi Pbinky,
Unfortunately, Gizmo is 100% correct. My thoughts are to worry yourself to death day in and day out will drive you crazy. Unless a heart murmur, or symptoms of HCM are detected by your vet, (you should have normal check ups by your vet as recommended) 99.9% of the time the vet will find no reason or cause to scan for HCM. HCM is a disease that effects all animals and humans, it is not only a scary "sphynx" disease as it comes across on this site, in fact if you go to a regular cats site with all breeds listed you will in fact read many unfortunate stories of all types of breeds who get this disease. If the breeder cat has HCM you have a chance of your kitty having it. If your breeders cat does not have HCM there is a chance your cat will have it some day. There is no guarantee. And even if a breeder scans and gives you a guarantee of your cat being HCM FREE, beware and read the fine print, They will offer your kitten/cat being HCM negative but you must scan your cat 2 or 3 times in x amount of years, and what would you or the breeder do at that point? give your cat back? replace with another? It is a tough choice but there is no guarantee. Although I do not like the fact your breeder did not call you back, which is wrong. Unfortunately many animals go a very long time undetected with this disease, the best advice is to ask your vet about what he or she recommends.
Good luck, Im glad you will get this off of your chest and I hope everything works out fine!:ThumbsUp:
 

Pbinky

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Thanks so much Admin. And you're right... lately i've found myself watching my cats like a hawk... counting breaths per minute...even bugging them when they sleep just to make sure that they are still ok and moving their hind legs :Sweat:
Wow... i need to chill out.
My vet said that he did here a very slight murmur when he first met Pbinky but has not heard it since (we went to the vet about a million times because Skinny came home with Giardia and URI)... he attributes what he heard the first time to Pbinky being scared and he said ever since then he made it a point to listen extremely carefully and hadn't heard anything of concern. I'll be packing Pbinky up in an hour and we'll be off to the cardiologist... hopefully this will put my anxiety to rest... for now. :Hysterical:
Thanks everyone for your well wishes, Pbinky and I (mostly I : p ) appreciate it so much. :Smile:

Hi Pbinky,
Unfortunately, Gizmo is 100% correct. My thoughts are to worry yourself to death day in and day out will drive you crazy. Unless a heart murmur, or symptoms of HCM are detected by your vet, (you should have normal check ups by your vet as recommended) 99.9% of the time the vet will find no reason or cause to scan for HCM. HCM is a disease that effects all animals and humans, it is not only a scary "sphynx" disease as it comes across on this site, in fact if you go to a regular cats site with all breeds listed you will in fact read many unfortunate stories of all types of breeds who get this disease. If the breeder cat has HCM you have a chance of your kitty having it. If your breeders cat does not have HCM there is a chance your cat will have it some day. There is no guarantee. And even if a breeder scans and gives you a guarantee of your cat being HCM FREE, beware and read the fine print, They will offer your kitten/cat being HCM negative but you must scan your cat 2 or 3 times in x amount of years, and what would you or the breeder do at that point? give your cat back? replace with another? It is a tough choice but there is no guarantee. Although I do not like the fact your breeder did not call you back, which is wrong. Unfortunately many animals go a very long time undetected with this disease, the best advice is to ask your vet about what he or she recommends.
Good luck, Im glad you will get this off of your chest and I hope everything works out fine!:ThumbsUp:
 

Brooke

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Hi Pbinky,
Unfortunately, Gizmo is 100% correct. My thoughts are to worry yourself to death day in and day out will drive you crazy. Unless a heart murmur, or symptoms of HCM are detected by your vet, (you should have normal check ups by your vet as recommended) 99.9% of the time the vet will find no reason or cause to scan for HCM. HCM is a disease that effects all animals and humans, it is not only a scary "sphynx" disease as it comes across on this site, in fact if you go to a regular cats site with all breeds listed you will in fact read many unfortunate stories of all types of breeds who get this disease. If the breeder cat has HCM you have a chance of your kitty having it. If your breeders cat does not have HCM there is a chance your cat will have it some day. There is no guarantee. And even if a breeder scans and gives you a guarantee of your cat being HCM FREE, beware and read the fine print, They will offer your kitten/cat being HCM negative but you must scan your cat 2 or 3 times in x amount of years, and what would you or the breeder do at that point? give your cat back? replace with another? It is a tough choice but there is no guarantee. Although I do not like the fact your breeder did not call you back, which is wrong. Unfortunately many animals go a very long time undetected with this disease, the best advice is to ask your vet about what he or she recommends.
Good luck, Im glad you will get this off of your chest and I hope everything works out fine!:ThumbsUp:

I absolutely agree - there is no way to guarantee that any cat will never get HCM.

BUT, I disagree with you in that I think HCM guarantees are fantastic for both breeder AND owner. Yes, they require the owner to scan their cat 2-3 times over a number of years (usually at 1-2 years old and again at 3-5 years old). What exactly is bad about doing that? Scanning my Nelson at 3 years old is the only reason I caught his disease. No one recommended it to me.

I have already spent $1,000 on Nelson's care this week. Had he come from a breeder, with an HCM guarantee - absolutely NO, I would not give him back, but a refund on purchase price would certainly help pay his medical bills.

And the benefit for the breeder? Wouldn't you love to be able to know how your cats are scanning 3 and 5 years from now? Wouldn't you want to know if you were producing HCM+ cats? This assures that pet owners scan their cats and report the results back to the breeder. It's an invaluable tool for breeders to keep track of any HCM in their lines. Especially when breeders so often pet out their breeding cats at 2-3 years of age and HCM doesn't present itself until 4 and 5 years. Breeders would know if HCM is a possibility in their lines even before it shows up in their own cats.

By the way - HCM can occur without a murmur. Harold did not have a murmur. Nelson has a murmur, and it was proven by echo last week that his murmur is physiological and totally unrelated to his HCM. You cannot rely on detection of a murmur to wait to scan your cats. Most vets do not know how prevalent HCM is in our breed. If you're waiting until your cat shows clinical signs of heart disease, and waiting for your vet to recommend that you scan your cat for HCM, you are putting your own cat and kittens at risk. By the time clinical signs appear, the cat has months, not years, of life left in him. And, if he's a breeding cat, he's already passed the gene on to his kittens.

These are FACTS.
 

ilovemysphynx

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Brooke, I am sorry you are going thru this for A second time and understand you wanting to be A advocate for them, that you do well, but the problem with HCM is that there is no guarantee. Yes your facts about HCM are true but it is not fact but opinion that A cat be scanned every few years. HCM can effect every living thing with A heart I know first hand that is how I lost my grandmother rest her soul, but that did not prompt me to run out and test myself before I had my children, because it still would not guarantee I won't have it in 10-20-or 30 years. We do follow our vets advice regarding HCM (who does know alot about the breed) along with CFA recommendations who our cats are registered with. see below.


Should my cats be tested for HCM and how often should they be tested?

In clinical practice, the most common patients tested for HCM with echocardiography are cats with suggestive clinical signs of heart disease, such as a heart murmur. Testing cats used in a pedigreed breeding program is a more difficult endeavor. Echocardiography is not a perfect tool for diagnosis of HCM – some affected individuals will escape detection and access to good quality ultrasound services may be difficult and expensive for some breeders. At the very least, breeding cats should be ausculted (examined by a vet with a stethoscope) for heart murmurs or arrhythmias once yearly. Any cat with an abnormality should have an echocardiogram. A significant percentage of cats with HCM will not have a heart murmur, however.





We do stand behind all or our kittens and do have generations of pedigree with no HCM showing as of yet in them. With that being said I would much rather be A honest breeder and person then dishonest. There are breeders who say they scan negative and to the common buyer that sounds great not realizing that only 1 or 2 of the cats in that cattery where scanned, not the other 8 to 10 and the breeder only did this to fit in with the question incase in should arise. That along with their sales pitch that they give A 5 year HCM guarantee, when they know that the most common age for HCM is over 5 years old. I can also say that my cats are my pets 100% of the time and that I know 100% of the time who the father to my babies are because I only have one, and I only have sphynx so there is no chance of mixing breeds. Other breeders outcross to extend the lines and yes this is needed, but what happens to the hairy kittens that are given away or sold very cheap are they scanned? We take pride in our cats and all the babies that have left my home for forever home, all breeders and people believe in different things, we are A small breeder and intend to keep it that way all of our babies live within 2 and 1/2 hours of me and I refuse to ship because that is my choice but if someone chooses to thats great. Heck shipping is much easier than selling locally because once you ship out of state that contract you had gotten from your breeder most of it is void anyway because the laws in every state are different and that is why the breeder does not answer the phone when you call them with problems because they don't have to. I went thru this with our first dog Sidney because we had her shipped and after her being extremely ill and found unfit for sale I was told there was nothing I could do because of the laws.
If we had anything to hide we would not have started this website. Yes we want to have information out there and people to be able to share the breed. People just need to know when to separate fact from opinion.

Again we are sorry you are going thru this again!
 

Brooke

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We do stand behind all or our kittens and do have generations of pedigree with no HCM showing as of yet in them. With that being said I would much rather be A honest breeder and person then dishonest. There are breeders who say they scan negative and to the common buyer that sounds great not realizing that only 1 or 2 of the cats in that cattery where scanned, not the other 8 to 10 and the breeder only did this to fit in with the question incase in should arise. That along with their sales pitch that they give A 5 year HCM guarantee, when they know that the most common age for HCM is over 5 years old. I can also say that my cats are my pets 100% of the time and that I know 100% of the time who the father to my babies are because I only have one, and I only have sphynx so there is no chance of mixing breeds. Other breeders outcross to extend the lines and yes this is needed, but what happens to the hairy kittens that are given away or sold very cheap are they scanned? We take pride in our cats and all the babies that have left my home for forever home, all breeders and people believe in different things, we are A small breeder and intend to keep it that way all of our babies live within 2 and 1/2 hours of me and I refuse to ship because that is my choice but if someone chooses to thats great. Heck shipping is much easier than selling locally because once you ship out of state that contract you had gotten from your breeder most of it is void anyway because the laws in every state are different and that is why the breeder does not answer the phone when you call them with problems because they don't have to. I went thru this with our first dog Sidney because we had her shipped and after her being extremely ill and found unfit for sale I was told there was nothing I could do because of the laws.
If we had anything to hide we would not have started this website. Yes we want to have information out there and people to be able to share the breed. People just need to know when to separate fact from opinion.

Again we are sorry you are going thru this again!

This doesn't make sense to me on many levels. I'm sorry about your grandmother. If her her condition was genetic, physicians should recommend you get yourself tested. It's not unheard of with many diseases and cancers. I don't know why people think it's so absurd to think in the same terms with our cats.

If your cats are your pets 100% of the time, why wouldn't you want to scan them to be sure of their health, now - rather than later when they're showing clinical signs and it's too late to help them? We cannot deny the prevalence of HCM in our breed. Anyone who continues to ignore it is just perpetuating the problem, in my humble opinion. Especially if you're in a position to do something about it. Whether it be me, thankful to have a voice in a forum, sharing my experiences & trying to educate people about the risks, or whether you're a breeder and can be responsible and do your part to try to end the spread of a genetic disease.

If they are part of your breeding program, why not scan them now to find potential problems, and GOD FORBID if they find anything, remove the cats from your program before they pass the HCM gene to countless more kittens? How do you know your cats aren't passing on HCM to their kittens if you aren't scannning them? How do you know there is not HCM in your pedigrees?
 

Pbinky

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:ThumbsUp::ThumbsUp:
Pbinky's heart is healthy!!The cardiologist said that everything looks totally normal!! She suggested i bring in Skinny when he's a year and a half and she wants to see Pbinky when he's 3. When, notice how i say when, Pbinky scans HCM free at three years of age then we may stretch it out for 2 years before the next scan. Same goes for Skinny.
I'm so relieved now.:Smile:
 

ilovemysphynx

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I am in no way saying that what anyone chooses to do with their pets is absurd. I am truly sorry that you are dealing with HCM for A second time, as with any disease with any life it is A sad and ugly thing. The only point is that people can scan all they want and have 10 negative results and still loose A pet to HCM, so giving someone faulse hope that A cat scanned negative in my opinion is absurd unless you can guarantee it forever. So if A breeder scans and has A negative result for 5 years but then on the 6th year after the cat is finished breeding it tests positive,or the cat becomes ill after it is rehomed because the breeder sold it after it was retired and has no idea what happens to it.(After claiming it was A loving pet). Yes it is sad but still the same result and outcome you would get if you did scan.

Brooke I am not saying that you are wrong in doing what you believe I am just saying that as with everything there are 2 ways to look at something. You are doing something you believe in and that is wonderful you should. I am also doing something I believe in.
 

ilovemysphynx

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:ThumbsUp::ThumbsUp:
Pbinky's heart is healthy!!The cardiologist said that everything looks totally normal!! She suggested i bring in Skinny when he's a year and a half and she wants to see Pbinky when he's 3. When, notice how i say when, Pbinky scans HCM free at three years of age then we may stretch it out for 2 years before the next scan. Same goes for Skinny.
I'm so relieved now.:Smile:

congrats to you:ThumbsUp:
 

Brooke

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:ThumbsUp::ThumbsUp:
Pbinky's heart is healthy!!The cardiologist said that everything looks totally normal!! She suggested i bring in Skinny when he's a year and a half and she wants to see Pbinky when he's 3. When, notice how i say when, Pbinky scans HCM free at three years of age then we may stretch it out for 2 years before the next scan. Same goes for Skinny.
I'm so relieved now.:Smile:

Congratulations!!
 
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