![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My wonderful, supportive husband took my cat to the vet today while I was giving a final exam. We had made an appointment for her last week, but she started to do better. J was feeding her miniscule amounts of canned food every 2 hours and mostly she was keeping it down. But in the last couple of days she stopped eating again and was throwing up, so I called this morning to make an appointment.
When I took Gwyn to the vet a few months ago because she wasn't eating and wasn't using the litter box, she had a lump they couldn't identify with x-rays. The doctor said it could just be a large hairball. I brought her back the next week after her taking Laxatone, and the ball had changed. I was releived, because to me it meant that the laxatone had nicked some of the mass off. But now I understand that the mass had just changed.
Today Gwyn has a mass in her abdomen that is bigger than her head. Really. She weighs 5 1/5 pounds, and a good bit of that weight is the tumor. We don't know 100% that it's cancer, but it's behaving like it. None of the other possibilities are much better. We've decided not to do exploratory surgery, because the outcome will be the same. She is dying.
Gwyn is 12 1/2 years old. That isn't very old for most cats these days. She's been with me ever since the summer after I was devastated by someone close dying. She went with me from Tennessee to Arkansas to Iowa and back to Tennessee. She's had to share space with her sister (litter-mate), briefly with my mom's dog, with a spastic tuxedo cat, and now with an orange tabby. She's kept me company and kept me saner.
I don't know how much longer we'll have her with us. We're giving her pain medication and subcutaneous liquid injections. But she's pretty weak, and she doesn't seem to have much joy. I think basically we're all trying to find a way to say goodbye. Part of me would like to just let her go outside and die like a proper cat, except I want to bury her next to her sister (who died this summer) in my mother's yard.
When I took Gwyn to the vet a few months ago because she wasn't eating and wasn't using the litter box, she had a lump they couldn't identify with x-rays. The doctor said it could just be a large hairball. I brought her back the next week after her taking Laxatone, and the ball had changed. I was releived, because to me it meant that the laxatone had nicked some of the mass off. But now I understand that the mass had just changed.
Today Gwyn has a mass in her abdomen that is bigger than her head. Really. She weighs 5 1/5 pounds, and a good bit of that weight is the tumor. We don't know 100% that it's cancer, but it's behaving like it. None of the other possibilities are much better. We've decided not to do exploratory surgery, because the outcome will be the same. She is dying.
Gwyn is 12 1/2 years old. That isn't very old for most cats these days. She's been with me ever since the summer after I was devastated by someone close dying. She went with me from Tennessee to Arkansas to Iowa and back to Tennessee. She's had to share space with her sister (litter-mate), briefly with my mom's dog, with a spastic tuxedo cat, and now with an orange tabby. She's kept me company and kept me saner.
I don't know how much longer we'll have her with us. We're giving her pain medication and subcutaneous liquid injections. But she's pretty weak, and she doesn't seem to have much joy. I think basically we're all trying to find a way to say goodbye. Part of me would like to just let her go outside and die like a proper cat, except I want to bury her next to her sister (who died this summer) in my mother's yard.