So, yeah

I'm still around but it's going to be far less frequent going forward. Too much else in my life demanding my time right now: work, dying cat (more on that in a bit), personal entanglements, more work, etc.

I would apologize for my scarcity, but I really don't feel all that bad about it. It is a good thing to be too busy to have time to document my life here, and since I primarily used this place as catharsis when I had far more to whine about than I currently do, I instead see my lack of time or interest in blogging to mean that I am in less need of therapy than previously might have been recommended. Maybe? Let me dream for a bit, OK?

So I mentioned the dying cat, and that is something I've been reluctant to blog about precisely because it is so upsetting to me. As I posted about last year, Claudio has had an ongoing puking problem for almost 2 years now. Last year, he developed Chylothorax, which is lymphatic fluid in his chest, of unknown origin. I spent a lot of money to hospitalize him for a week and then it sort of magically got better, but the puking continued. I thought about taking him to the vet for more tests, but he seemed for the most part fine despite the puke problem (which admittedly is not ideal for the appearance of my house, but still.) I also was afraid they would want to run numerous expensive tests that would continue to reveal nothing about what was causing the problem.

Then, back in November, Claudio started pooping on the floor. He was doing it every day, and I read online that often cats do this because they are feeling ill and are trying to find a way to tell their owners. I started thinking more seriously about taking him to the vet. Then, one night a few days later, I was rubbing his belly while he was laying on my desk, and I felt something hard in his abdomen. It concerned me. I decided I would take him later that week, and he suddenly started acting like he felt awful. He was hiding under the guest bed, not eating very much, and moving very slowly. I made a vet appointment. The vet initially thought the mass I felt in his belly was just feces, and that he likely had irritable bowel syndrome after seeing some thickening of his intestine on X-ray. I went home to await the results of bloodwork, after he got some IV fluids.

Two days later the cat was not only feeling better, but I noticed that his left pupil was permanently dilated as compared to his right. In humans, differences in pupil size is nearly always a sign of serious neurological conditions (stroke, brain tumor, etc.) so this was an emergency. I took him back to the vet, and they said it could be Horner's Syndrome, a neurological condition that can be caused by infections, trauma, or tumors that result in pressure on the optic nerve that causes the dilation. He had an ear that was very sensitive and had fluid in it suggestive of ear infection, so they gave me antibiotics and told me he would hopefully get better once the infection in his ear was cleared up. I was also supposed to bring him back in a couple days for an abdominal ultrasound, because his bloodwork had been for the most part normal and they wanted to look at his intestine.

The ultrasound was finally performed, and revealed what I had been afraid of all along: a large abdominal mass either very near or wrapped around his intestines, and another spot on his liver. The vet took a sample of fluid from the mass for testing, and told me that the most likely cause of the mass was lymphoma. She started him on steroids, and told me that I could consider chemotherapy, steroid therapy alone, or do nothing. It sounded like his options ranged from a few weeks at best to potentially much longer if the chemotherapy was a success.

I'll spare you the details of some uncertainty that was injected into the diagnosis, but the steroids worked wonders--his eyes returned to normal and he was acting like his old happy self the next day. A week later the vet did a second ultrasound, and already the mass had shrunk. Though I lacked a definitive diagnosis, she told me that nothing else would have reacted so well to steroids, other than cancer. So, my kitty has lymphoma and is living on borrowed time. The vet hopes that I will get 3-6 months with him while on the steroids before they stop working, the tumor starts growing again, and he has to be put to sleep. I decided against the chemotherapy because the cat would hate it, it is insanely expensive, and ultimately in about half the cases it doesn't really prolong the cat's life that much anyhow.

He is his old sweet self, waking me up early every morning with plaintive wails for food, scratching all leather shoes and all wooden doorways, curling up next to me every night to purr while we sleep, and generally being adorable. I have to give him liquid steroids every day, which he became a total shit about taking via syringe by mouth, so I mix them into some milk. He is eating well and seems to have no obvious signs of a problem, other than a stomach that growls loudly for at least an hour after he eats.

He is on borrowed time, and my fervent desire to make sure I spend as much time with him as I can in the little time we have left together is yet another reason I never post anymore. I will miss this cat so much when is gone, that I can already feel the heartache. I'm scared of exactly how hard it will be. He has been with me for 9 years, through multiple breakups, a layoff, a move from Boston to Atlanta, an ice storm in which I had no power for three cold days, and so much more. He has been my constant little slice of happiness ever since we got him from a shelter a month after 9/11. And soon, way too soon, I will have to make the terrible decision to end his life before he suffers too much. It's going to be awful.