A post about Moki

This is off-topic, but since we use our blog as a journal, I wanted to document what is going on with Moki, who has been getting laser acupuncture treatments every month since she had an initial treatment on July 28th.  In November, we had one treatment at 3 weeks - so the next was scheduled for 5 weeks instead of four.  About 10 days ago, I had commented that it was hard to know if she was getting any additional benefit from the sessions and perhaps we did not need to put her in the car and drive the 25 minutes for them.

For the week or so before her appointment yesterday, Moki stopped playing with us in the evening.  She will normally jump in the air to bring down flying string toys, or chase a laser light madly (on the well-padded carpet only - she does not play anywhere else.)  She seems rather OCD about everything, and for her to pass up on playtime is not a good sign. The day before her treatment, she would not even play Catch the Crunchy, where we toss a treat and she runs for it, athletically leaping over obstacles anywhere in the room and that is her favorite activity.  She had also been skipping her morning naps on my lap.

However, the night before her appointment I was sitting with her resting on the carpet.  Norris walked into the room and she suddenly went to the top of her cat tree, and started exhibiting this specific behavior which we decided to videotape her for the vet.  The video starts slow and uninteresting, but she was in the middle of an episode of what we're calling Feline Hyperesthesia Syndrome that she had begun before we got the camera on her.  She exhibits the classic Hyperesthesia behaviors - frantic cleaning gestures, tail thrashing and skin rippling (not visible in the video) that builds to attacking herself.  At the 24-second mark, you hear an explosive sound. That is the sound of a cat spitting, which I had never noticed from any cat before Moki.

Moki was relatively agitated during our trip to the vet for her treatment yesterday morning, crying the whole way which she does not usually do, but was silent on the way home and calm all day,  She was more interested in playing last night, and although not yet up to running and jumping, she did trot after a couple of crunchy treats if they were thrown close enough to her. And this morning, when I sat down and put my legs up, she came right over and fell asleep on me.

The hyperesthesia symptoms we videotaped and posted here are not as bad as they had been before she started getting treatments. This makes it seem that Moki really needs the kind of help she's getting from acupuncture.  The sessions include photon treatments with a device that was new to Dr. Fochios when we first took Moki to her.  Dr. Fochios believes Moki is in some kind of pain when she does this, and since she doesn't understand it, thinks something else is attacking her.  That certainly explains the frightened look in her eyes and attempts to capture her tail.

Feline Hyperesthesia Syndrome is a mysterious condition. The cat whose owners had to call 911 because they were trapped by him in the bedroom has been diagnosed with it and seems to have a more serious underlying problem than Moki does. Usually, it is treated with calming and/or anti-seizure drugs. We did not document her tail-chasing for the year that Moki was on the calming medications, but we believe she has been doing this, or some less extreme version of it, for years.  We simply didn't know it wasn't just the "cat-crazies."