Cat ate gum

Hey everyone, two days ago I found a digested piece of chewed gum stuck in the fur on my cat's butt. I took him to the vet where we had blood work done, looking particularly at liver function and glucose levels, in case of xylitol toxicity, and everything was perfectly normal. The doctor prescribed acetylcysteine, hepatiale forte advanced, and liquid vitamin K, and today we repeated the blood tests and everything is still fine. He suggested we continue the treatments for several days or even a couple weeks, but my concern is how stressful giving him pills is for him, and the fact that he already immediately vomited after giving him one. Since it seems he never had any issues as far as his bloodwork show, is it necessary to keep stressing him with swallowing pills and potentially continuing to throw them up? Thanks for any advice!

Hello!  I don't know how long a peice of chewing gum sitting in a cats' stomach can take to digest but as it is digested, Xylitol may be released into the patient's system for a certain amount of time and this, as you know, can be quite risky.  This may explain why your vet wishes to give on-going treatment. So how does the vet know how long to give the treatment for?  Often, in the UK, they will consult a toxicology expert or database, in which is stored the known information about any particular toxin, along with information from new poisonings.  This information is then used to give the best advice about how to treat future patients.  There are also certain trusted books that are regularly updated. I would always stand by the advice of these or similar expert sources and most vets will consult such a source when presented with a new toxicology case. By all means, chat to your vet to persuade yourself that they are sure of their source, but if they are, then it is likely to be based on science so we would highly recommend following it. If you search in the blog, you may find an article or two about giving pills to cats - it is nobody's favourite pastime, but there are one or two tricks to it. Best of luck.