I looked deeply into my cat’s eyes this morning, and told him how much I love him and that everything will be okay. He was sitting in his cat carrier already, and was meowing his discontent. Having been to the vet twice recently for tests which assaulted his body and dignity, I’m sure he was aghast that we were doing this to him again, and anxious about what was to come.
What he doesn’t understand is that this is going to be a really important day for us all, kitty, Mr. Helix and me. Our dear Creamsickle (deliberately spelled like that to make him more badass, well, as badass as you can be when named after ice cream) has a tumor on his lung, and the vet has been giving us more and more alarming news since we first began noticing how thin he was becoming. Today, he is having surgery to have the tumor removed and biopsied, and from there we know what his prognosis will be.
Initially, the vet said that his prognosis was months, but months in which the tumor grew and pressed on his lung, making it more and more difficult to breathe, and making him increasingly uncomfortable. Right now, the only thing that seemed wrong was that he got quite thin over a period of time, and that he developed a wheeze not unlike that when a cat is about to cough up a hairball, only with no disgusting results. He acted fine, ate ok, and was his usual loving self. The vet said that the sound he was making was a cough, and an indication that something was wrong. Boy, was that an understatement.
The prognosis with surgery is unknown right now. It seems this tumor is in a difficult place to remove it entirely, caught up in some kind of lung structure that I don’t completely understand, and that there is a good possibility (I should say bad possibility) that they will not be able to remove it completely. Whatever is left will grow again, and depending on what the biopsy tells them is how long he may live.
Creamsickle is one of the two cats that Mr. Helix had when we brought our households together and created the Brady Bunch of cats. Sadly, the other cat he brought Mushyhead got cancer a few years ago, and all the chemo in the world didn’t save her. It’s with the memory of this and the demise of other beloved cats that we give him over to the vet this morning, hoping so much for more quality time for him. Neither of us want to torment him for nothing, but we have been assured that to leave it alone, the tumor would quickly become such a burden on his breathing, and he would be gone in months. The prudent thing to do, the loving thing to do, is this surgery.
So, today we swallowed with a huge lump in our throats, and told our cat how much we love him, and that it will be okay. I hope we weren’t lying to him.