Our 18 year old cat has been having some problems on and off for years
now and they suddenly have gotten worse. The first problem is that she
has a hard time chewing her food. We feed her canned food which she
usually gobbles up quickly, but recently she does this weird thing
where her chewing motion becomes very exaggerated and sloppy. Much of
the food just falls out of her mouth and she turns her head from side
to side like she's having a lot of trouble keeping it in her mouth and
getting it down. Instead of eating all the food in the bowl which
she'd usually do (she loves food), she just gives up after a few bites
and walks away in frustration. After she's done eating, she'll
continue to do the same exaggerated chewing motion and repeatedly
stick her tongue out while turning her head from side to side even
though she's not eating anymore. It looks like maybe she's getting
food stuck in the back of her mouth or her teeth or throat or
something and is trying to swallow it or dislodge it with this chewing
motion. It's similar to what you see a dog do when you give him peanut
butter and it gets stuck on the roof of his mouth or what an animal
would do if they ate a bite of a food and then suddenly realized they
didn't like it. I hope you can picture what I'm talking about. It
sounds similar to what was described in a previous message on this
board entitled "Cat making a Chewing Like Movement all the time."
Every now and then, she'll do this phantom chewing thing even when she
hasn't eaten for a while. When she does it I think I might even hear a
faint grinding sound like her jaw joint or something? Or maybe it's
the rough part of her tongue scraping, I don't know. This problem has
occured a few times over the past few years, but recently it started
happening on a daily basis. It's very hard to describe to the vet and
we can never get her to demonstrate it to them because she gets scared
there and won't eat.

The other problem is with loud, congested breathing. For years now,
she's snored all the time while sleeping. But even when she's awake,
she has a sort of congested snoring-like breathing sound when she's
laying in certain positions. I'm sure this isn't normal, but the vet
didn't seem to think anything of it, maybe because we couldn't get her
to breathe that way at the vet. She seems to breathe like this a lot
if not most of the time now. It's not necessarily labored breathing,
just congested, like a gentle snore. And no, it's not purring. But
sometimes she does start purring along with the loud breathing and it
makes a very odd sound, almost like a pigeon cooing or something.
What's going on with our cat?!