How long do cats live with kidney disease?

How long will my cat live with kidney disease?

You've probably already searched this, found a number, and felt worse. So let me give you the numbers properly, with the context that makes them mean something, and then tell you why they matter less than the things you can actually change.

Why the spread is so wide

Two cats with identical creatinine values can have completely different years ahead of them, and the difference usually isn't luck.

Whether she keeps eating. This is the single strongest signal, and it's the one you can watch from your kitchen. A cat who eats and holds her weight is in a different situation from a cat who doesn't, regardless of what her stage says. It's also treatable, because a kidney cat who won't eat is usually nauseated rather than finished.

Whether she's losing protein in her urine. Proteinuria shortens the course meaningfully, and it's treatable with a specific drug. It's measured as a UPC and plenty of cats have never had one run. If you want one number to ask for after reading this page, ask for that one.

Whether her phosphorus is controlled. Above target, phosphorus actively damages what's left and makes her feel unwell. It's one of the things we have the most control over.

Whether her blood pressure has been measured and treated. Between one in five and one in three kidney cats is hypertensive, and untreated it grinds down the remaining kidney tissue.

Notice that all four are things somebody can do something about. That's the actual message of this page.

The stage isn't a countdown

A stage describes where she is now. It's a treatment map, and it does that job well. It's a poor predictor and a terrible thing to sit and stare at.

Worth knowing too: stage 2 is a wide band, so a cat at 1.7 and a cat at 2.7 carry the same label and are not in the same position. And a cat staged on the day she came in dehydrated can read a full stage worse than she really is, because dehydration inflates creatinine. If she was staged on her worst day, ask whether it's worth rechecking now she's stable. I've seen that alone move a cat from a frightening number to a much better one, without anything about her actually changing.

The full explanation, including substaging, is on the IRIS stages page.

What the time actually looks like

The thing nobody tells you when they hand you a median: this disease is mostly ordinary.

Kidney cats aren't sick every day. A well-managed kidney cat sleeps in the sun, complains about dinner being late, sits on the paperwork you're trying to read, and behaves like a cat. There are bad weeks and there are rechecks that come back worse, and in between there's a great deal of normal life.

The decline, when it comes, is usually a slow fade rather than a cliff, punctuated by crises that are often treatable. A bad week is genuinely not always the last week. A cat who's dehydrated, nauseated, constipated, or fighting a kidney infection can feel considerably better in a few days, and that's worth finding out before anybody concludes anything.

What she doesn't know

She doesn't know she has a diagnosis. She isn't counting months, she isn't frightened of what's coming, and she has no concept of her own prognosis.

She takes her reading of how bad this is from how the house feels. That's genuinely useful to you, because it means calm and boring is a form of treatment, not just a mood you're trying to fake.

How to stop the number running your week

Practical, because searching this at midnight is a habit and habits need replacing rather than resisting.

Look it up once, then close the tab. You've now done that. There's no further information in the fifth reading.

Replace the search with something that generates real data. Weigh her on Sundays and write it down. That's a number about your cat, it takes ninety seconds, and it's more informative than any median. The monitoring page covers what's worth tracking.

Put the question on the recheck list instead. "Given her last three panels, what would you expect the next year to look like?" is a question your own vet can answer with her actual numbers in front of them. A website cannot.

Notice what the searching is for. Most of the time it's not information, it's wanting somebody to tell you it'll be fine. That's a completely reasonable thing to want. It just isn't in the statistics, and it's worth naming rather than chasing at 2am.

Where the honest hard part is

At some point, for most cats, treatment stops buying good days and starts buying days. Those are different things, and telling them apart is the hardest judgment in this whole illness.

I won't make that call for you, and I've written properly about how I think about it, including the three-things test, on knowing when it's time. It's worth reading before you need it. Almost everybody who reads it early tells me they were glad they did.

For now, though, if she's eating and interested in her own life, the number on this page is not the thing to be thinking about. Her weight on Sunday is.