After my 18-year-old white cat was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (CKD), the vet recommended regular fluid supplementation — subcutaneous injections at home. But putting it into practice turned out to be far harder than I imagined.
Watching the vet or a tech do it at the clinic looks quick and easy. Doing it at home yourself, your hands won’t stop shaking. One wrong placement and you hurt your cat or miss entirely. I have two cats: my orange cat is easygoing and handled it reasonably well, but my white cat has always been high-strung. Add in the fact that she also has pancreatitis, and every time I disinfected the area and tried to find loose skin, she’d tense up and struggle — there were times she actually jumped away the moment the needle went in.
The more times I tried, the more vigilant she became. She’d go on alert the moment she saw me preparing the needle and fluid bag. The whole process became exhausting and stressful. I spent hours trying to calm her down, and still failed regularly.
That’s when I started reading foreign articles and discovered that not every kidney cat absolutely has to have sub-Q fluids. Some vets even recommend encouraging voluntary water intake as the primary approach. This gave me a new idea. I started reducing the sub-Q attempts and trying different methods to get her to drink more on her own:
- Using a syringe to slowly offer warm water for her to lap up during medication time
- Cooking unsalted, plain chicken breast broth, cooling it, and offering it to her
- Trying bowls of different materials (ceramic, glass)
- Setting up multiple water stations around the house
After more than a month of effort, she was drinking about 70–100 cc more per day (40 cc via syringe + 30–70 cc of chicken broth). The most moving moment came when the follow-up bloodwork showed her creatinine (CREA) had dropped from 2.6 to 2.0. I cried looking at that report.
Takeaway:
Sub-Q fluids aren’t the only option. If your cat strongly resists them or they’re just not working, talk to your vet about making “encouraging voluntary hydration” the primary approach. For some cats, the results can actually be better than forcing sub-Q injections.