My ten year old female Siamese mix cat has had a stroke. She is not eating and drinking on her own. She has been seen by a vet, but nothing really helpful came of that. We know she can not chew. We are beginning to suspect that her sense of smell has been altered or is gone completely. Per the vet's instructions we are force feeding her unflavored Pedialyte with a syringe. Any suggestions on how to get her to drink would be especially helpful. Thanks!

The only thing I can think of is giving her the water drained from a can of tuna. Even add regular water to it. Maybe the tuna flavor will get her to drink the water.

I'd get a second opinion from another vet. What all did this vet do that "nothing really helpful came of it"? This idea of a cat having a stroke seems to be a fairly new one and not well researched. There actually isn't some "treatment" per se, but trying to find a cause behind it is a good idea to possibly prevent another one.

These problems may likely go away after a couple of weeks and there may or may not be any more trouble. So it may just be a matter of dealing with the problems for a short time. If she can't chew, she needs to get wet food of some sort. You can syringe feed regular old canned cat food, as long as you're force feeding anyway. You might try meat (no onion) baby food and see if she'll eat that on her own. That sometimes works with cats who don't want to eat much on their own. But that's not an appropriate "diet," only a temporary thing to do. It's good if you can get her to eat some on her own. So you'd want to make sure she gets some normal cat food for the supplements. Don't know if her sense of smell is gone or not, but it may be diminished. You can try zapping some canned food in the microwave to make it more smelly, but be careful cause it burns quickly. (We're talking seconds here.)

As for water, if you can't get her to drink on her own, you can syringe that as well -- just try to squirt it in so that she can swallow it on her own rather than into the back of the throat and make her choke. And if you syringe some canned food, you'll have to add a bit of water to make it go through the syringe easily anyway, and between that and what's already in the food should be enough.

She needs to have food. If you have too much trouble getting it into her, you can have a temporary feeding tube put in. There's different kinds, but there's one that's quick and used just temporarily for the short-term, and this is hopefully just temporary.