What Happened When My Cat Wouldn't Stop Vomiting for 3 Days

Cats throw up. That's just a fact of owning one. If you've had a cat for more than a year, you've probably stepped on a hairball in socked feet at least once and you know the drill: clean it up, move on, don't think about it too hard.

So when Mochi threw up on day one, I didn't think much of it. Day two, still not overly worried — maybe she'd eaten something weird, cats do that. It was day three, when she threw up twice before 9am and then walked away from her food bowl without touching it, that I actually started paying attention.

I'll be honest about why I hadn't called anyone yet: I didn't want to be "that" cat owner who rushes to the vet over a hairball. I think a lot of people who grew up with cats have this instinct to underreact, because so much of normal cat behavior looks alarming if you don't know it's normal.

But three days of vomiting plus not eating is a different category of thing than one gross Tuesday morning. I used the video vet feature in the Waggle app mainly because it was 10pm and I didn't want to wait until my regular vet opened the next morning to just get told "come in." The vet had me describe the vomit (yes, this is a real conversation you have to have — was it foamy, did it have food in it, undigested or not) and asked about her water intake, litter box habits, and whether she'd lost weight I could feel along her spine.

Based on all of that, she told me this had crossed from "probably fine" into "needs to be seen in person within 24 hours" territory, specifically because of the combination of vomiting plus not eating plus how long it had gone on. She wrote up a summary I could show my regular vet the next morning so I didn't have to re-explain three days of symptoms to someone meeting Mochi for the first time.

Turned out to be a mild case of pancreatitis, caught early enough that it was a course of medication and a bland diet for a week rather than anything worse. My vet actually said the early flag helped — pancreatitis in cats can get serious if it's missed for too long.

What I took from this: the "wait and see" instinct with cats is usually right, until it isn't, and the hard part is knowing which one you're dealing with at 10pm on day three. If you're in the same spot — not sure if this is nothing or something — figuring out if it's actually an emergency is worth five minutes before you decide to just wait one more day. And if your cat's the type to snack on things she shouldn't, houseplants are a bigger deal than most people realize.

Mochi is fine now and back to her usual routine of judging me from the top of the fridge.