Health & Medical

For two years I thought my cat Mochi had hairballs. The gag, the crouch, the effort that produced nothing. Then one evening he opened his mouth and sucked at the air like a fish on a dock, and I realised a hairball doesn't make a cat look terrified. This was something else. This was his asthma, and I'd missed it because it wore a familiar costume.

Feline asthma is the airways swelling and tightening, the bronchi spasming when they shouldn't. A coughing cat is easy to misread. It sounds like retching, head down, shoulders hunched, but nothing comes up. Real wheezing shows up too, a whistle you catch if the room is quiet. The scary one is open-mouth breathing. A cat breathing through its mouth is in trouble, full stop, and that's an emergency, not a waiting game.

Triggers are everywhere in a normal home. Dust under the sofa. Smoke from a candle. Scented litter that smells like a cleaning aisle. Aerosol sprays, perfume, even a sudden fright. Mochi's worst fit followed a friend's heavy perfume and a vacuum running at once. Stress counts. Cats are not stoic about air they can't get.

The diagnosis took ruling things out. An x-ray showed his lungs with the classic bright-striped bronchial pattern, and the vet worked to exclude heart disease, because a coughing cat can have a tired heart instead of twitchy airways, and the treatment is different. Bloods helped. Once the heart was cleared, the picture fit asthma.

The wait for the diagnosis was its own small anxiety. Mochi kept having fits while we waited for the x-ray, and each one looked worse than the last in the half-light of the bedroom. Our vet was calm about it, which helped more than any medicine. She said cats are dramatic breathers and that we'd caught it early, which is the best possible version of this news.

What threw us at first was how ordinary the triggers looked. A window left open on a pollen day. A new laundry powder. None of it dramatic, all of it enough. We keep a note on the fridge of what set him off, and it reads like a boring shopping list. That's the thing with asthma. The enemy is mundane.

Living with tight airways

The treatment my vet settled on was a metered-dose inhaler with a spacer chamber, the little mask that fits over the cat's face. Steroids to calm the swelling, a bronchodilator to open things up, puffed in twice a day through the chamber. Mochi tolerated it better than the pills ever went down. Some cats need oral steroids in a flare. The inhaler keeps the daily dose low and the side effects smaller.

We changed the air, not just the cat. Unscented litter. No candles. A purifier in the room he sleeps in. Vacuum often, dust the shelves, wash the curtains he rubs against. It's a cleaner house than I earned, but his breathing is worth it. On bad-air days we keep him in the calm room with the door shut. The first time we used the chamber he fought it; now he sits on the towel, tolerates the mask for the ten seconds it takes, and expects a treat he absolutely receives.

Training him to the chamber took a week of patience we didn't know we had. First just the mask near his face for a treat, then the mask on, then the puff. He figured out the treat came after the hiss, and now he leans into it like it's a weird spa day. The trick, the vet nurse told us, is never to fight him, because a stressed cat won't breathe the dose in anyway.

We also keep a flare kit by the door. The inhaler, a spare chamber, his steroid prescription, and the ER's number written on the outside. When he's mid-fit and I'm fumbling, I don't want to be reading fine print. Talk to your vet about what belongs in yours, because every cat's plan looks a little different.

If he goes to open-mouth breathing, we don't think, we go. ER, now. Talk to your vet about a written plan for flare days, because in the moment you will not remember the dose or the order. Mochi had one bad night last spring. The inhaler bought us time to the clinic. He's sprawled on the windowsill as I write this, belly up, breathing easy.

Watching him now, you'd never guess he has a chronic lung. He chases the red dot, claims the warmest cushion, and only the faint rattler when he's exerted gives it away. The asthma didn't take his life down a notch. It took our carelessness, and that's a trade I'll make every time. His sister cat ignores the whole production, which is for the best. Two anxious animals in one flat would be too much.