Cat Vomiting: Log It, Then Go to the Vet

Cat Vomiting: Log It, Then Go to the Vet

You hear often enough that cats just throw up sometimes. What nobody tells you is whether “sometimes” means once a week or once a day. Then at the clinic the question comes, how often does she throw up, and that is when the answer stops coming.

What the vet asks

Go in for vomiting and the questions are mostly the same ones.

• How often does it happen
• How long after eating does it happen
• What comes up
• When did it start
• Is she eating normally

Your cat cannot answer any of it. The only thing that can answer in her place is what you wrote down.

Two buttons are enough

Make one “Vomit” button and one “Food” button. Tap the food one too, and the two records sit side by side on the Timeline. Whether she throws up fifteen minutes after eating or much later on an empty stomach shows itself without you working anything out.

Vomit and food: two buttons will doFifteen minutes after the meal, right there in the list

The note is for what came up

You can leave a note after tapping. Write down briefly what it looked like.

• “Undigested food”
• “Hairball”
• “Yellow foam”
• “Just water”

If you only found it, say so

If you came home from work and found it on the floor, you do not know when it actually happened. Tap anyway and add “Found it” to the note. Mix up the ones you saw with the ones you found and the intervals after meals will give you the wrong conclusion later.

Mark the day you changed the food

On the day you switch the food or the treats, leave a note on the “Food” record. “Food changed” is enough. A few weeks later you can compare how often she threw up before and after.

Look for a cluster in the early hours

Once a few weeks of records are in, the hourly distribution on the Statistics screen starts to show the hours she throws up. Whether they cluster in the early hours, whether they cluster right after mealtimes. What that means is for the vet to judge, but walking in with it makes the appointment go much faster.

At the clinic, show the Timeline

Open the Timeline in the exam room and how many times, at what hours, and what came up is there by date at a glance. If the record is long, exporting it to CSV and printing it before the visit works too.

A record is not a diagnosis

What a record can tell you is when and how often she threw up, and there it stops. The cause is for the vet to judge.

If the vomiting suddenly gets more frequent, if she has no energy, or if she stops eating, go straight in rather than waiting for records to pile up.