Why cats hide illness so well
Cats are wired to conceal weakness — evolution punished the obviously-sick. The practical consequence: by the time a cat looks unmistakably ill, the underlying problem has often been running for a while. Cat illness therefore rarely announces; it subtracts. Less greeting, less grooming, less presence in the usual rooms. The owners who catch things early are not the ones watching for symptoms but the ones who notice absences — which requires knowing, concretely, what this cat's normal looks like.
Feline emergencies: call now
- Straining in the litter box producing little or nothing — in male cats a urinary blockage is fatal within days and painful within hours; this is a now emergency, not a morning one
- Open-mouth breathing or visible respiratory effort — cats essentially never pant; a cat breathing like a dog is in trouble
- Not eating for more than 24 hours — beyond the underlying cause, anorexia itself endangers cats: their livers handle starvation badly (hepatic lipidosis)
- Sudden hind-leg weakness or paralysis, often with crying — a thromboembolism presentation, extremely painful and time-critical
- Repeated vomiting, especially with lethargy or hiding
- Crying out in pain, unresponsiveness, or collapse
The litter box is a health dashboard
No other cat data source is as objective. Worth tracking without any special effort: frequency of urination (clump count), clump size (larger over weeks can mean more drinking — an early flag for kidney and other conditions), stool consistency, misses outside the box, and straining or vocalizing during use. A previously tidy cat urinating outside the box is presenting a symptom, not a protest — behavioral explanations are real but medical ones get ruled out first.
Eating and drinking drift
Cat appetite fades in increments — half-finished bowls, sudden pickiness, interest without commitment (approaches food, sniffs, leaves — often a nausea or dental tell). Water moves the other way: a cat suddenly camped at the water bowl or fountain is generating a data point that vets take seriously. Because cats are grazers, per-meal judgment is hard; total daily intake, eyeballed against the normal, is the trackable number.
Grooming, coat, and posture
Both directions of grooming change carry signal: an unkempt, greasy, or clumped coat suggests a cat that has stopped self-maintaining (pain, nausea, age), while bald patches or wet-licked spots point to overgrooming a location that hurts or itches. Posture speaks too — the tight meatloaf hunch with tucked paws and closed-ish eyes, sustained in an odd location, is a classic discomfort picture, very different from the same shape in a relaxed loaf-shaped nap.
Hiding, voice, and social change
Hiding is the cat symptom most reliably dismissed as personality. Contextualize it: a social cat newly living under beds, a lap cat that stopped appearing, a vocal cat gone quiet or a quiet one newly yowling (especially at night, especially in older cats) — each is a documented-with-dates observation worth a vet conversation if it holds for more than a couple of days. Sudden aggression when touched in a specific place maps to pain until proven otherwise.
Documenting a creature this subtle
Cat observations are baseline-relative, so the log matters double: date, what changed, versus what normal. Count what counts — clumps, meals, hairballs, hiding hours. Photograph the coat and any posture oddities; film breathing at rest if respiration is the worry (count breaths for 30 seconds while asleep — resting rates trending above the low thirties per minute are worth reporting). Pawmi keeps these notes per cat, and its baseline-then-changes structure is built for exactly this kind of animal.