Kaylee is no longer a radiocat!
At the beginning of this year, during her annual check up, Kaylee was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism.
In the US, for hyperthyroid cats, there are usually 2 ways: either use prescribed drugs, which does not really cure hyperthyroidism, just control the symptom; or use radioactive Iodine-131 therapy, which is expensive(-ish) but would, usually, cure hyperthyroidism once and for all.
So we opted for I131 therapy. The only place that offers it around us is SAGE. We booked an appointment with SAGE for the initial consultant on March, and during the consultant appointment we booked the actual therapy on April.
The process SAGE provides is that we drop Kaylee off on a Tuesday morning, then pick her up 3 days later, on Friday afternoon.
In “prepare” for this, we also bought a Geiger counter to monitor the radiation level from her.
The day we picked her up from SAGE:
For the first two weeks, we isolated her in a spare bathroom, as otherwise she would love to curl up next to a human on the couch, and her radiation level was too high for that.
For people not familiar with radiation level readings, the Geiger counter we bought comes with a card with a table on it to explain:
| uSv/h | Action |
|---|---|
| 0.03-0.33 | Normal background. No action needed |
| 0.33-0.65 | Medium level, check the reading regularly |
| >0.65 | High level. Closely watch the reading, find out why. |
| >6.50 | Very high. Leave the area ASAP, and find out why. |
| >13 | Extremely high. Evacuate immediately, report to government. |
And I also referenced xkcd’s radiation dose chart, as referenced in wikipedia’s sievert page (and formed a “citogenesis”).
So anyways, ~55 uSv/h was an extremely high reading. But it drops steadily over the days, which I documented in this fediverse thread. The Geiger counter we bought makes beeping noise when the reading is high (which makes a lot of sense), which Kayle really hates, so I usually have to get the reading when she’s distracted by food.
After 2 weeks, her radiation level finally dropped to a “normal” level and we can let her out of isolation:
And, one month after the I131 therapy, we visited our vet to get her thyroid level tested again, and the result just came back to be in the normal range! So finally Kaylee is no longer a radiocat nor a hyperthyroid cat! The cost for I131 therapy (excluding diagnostics) was about $1,000.