I'm so sorry for your loss.  I found this link with information on bacterial
peritonitis.  I hope it helps.

Bonnie

www.merckvetmanual.com/mvm/index.jsp?cfile=htm/bc/51800.htm

I too had a cat die from this.  She was lethargic, hiding laying on her
side, and not eating.  I took her to the vet on Saturday where she got a
blood test and was sent home with instructions to be given pepcid ac and
laxatone.  The vet thought it might be hairballs.  Keep in mind this was not
the head vet.  My cat  continued to get worse and I took her to the
emergency vet Sunday night.  She just looked at her and thought she was ok.
By Monday she was barely moving.  The blood test came back showing high
white blood cell count.  We bring her back in, the main vets sees her, and
she is nearly comatose.  Diagnosis: peritonitis.  We schedule a same day
operation (50/50 chance of survival) with one of the top surgical veterinary
clinics in the area.  My poor Zoe didn't wake up.

The thing with Zoe is she wasn't showing a fever until the last day.  I
still feel if the first vet had put her on antibiotics as a precaution (she
did find her gut to be swollen), though I know overuse of antibiotics is a
concern,  Zoe would still be with us.

Peritonitis is where something punctures the peritoneum either from the
outside or the inside and the peritoneum gets infected.  With Zoe they found
no foreign object and there were no wounds from the outside.

Good luck in finding out more information.  You might want to check out the
Cornell Vet school site: http://www.vet.cornell.edu/

Stacey

It was very hard to look up

Hi JJ,

Our cat recently had that. It was touch and go for her -- we were told
she had a 20% chance of survival. The emergency vet said cats do not
handle peritonitis well at all. It is basically an infection of the
lining of the abdomen and puts all of the organs encased in the abdomen
"pouch" at risk.

Our cat had megacolon before any of this -- she lost the ability to,
well, poop. She finally had a surgery to remove her colon, then the
peritonitis developed a few days later when a stitch or two holding the
intestine together loosened and let bacteria out into the abdomen. That
is what caused her infection, essentially a man-made perforation in the
intestine.

She made it through the second surgery. What they had to do was open up
the abdomen cavity and completely wash everything out with warm saline.
I think they said they did it about 4 times -- the surgery was 3 hours
long.

Sweeter made it through and it's been a long recovery. She was in the
hospital almost a week and was on 3 different antibiotics. She is now
feeling really good again.

I'm sorry they couldn't find your cat's problem beforehand, but it seems
that this is a hard thing to treat in cats. Did they find what caused
the abdomen infection in the first place?

Take care,

Rhonda