Again.

[feuervogel]

Monday Mylene was limping, and it wasn't better Tuesday morning, so I took her to the vet. They thought it was arthritis and tendinitis, gave us tramadol and Dasuquin. Tuesday evening we gave her a second dose of tramadol, and she responded poorly. Like, trip to the closest vet hospital poorly.

So we go to the vet hospital in Durham at 9 pm, get her on fluids and oxygen. They take some blood. Her hematocrit is 14%; she needs a transfusion. They keep her overnight, and the radiologist & oncologist will look at her in the morning.

This time it's definitely lymphoma. As opposed to March, when the vet school said it was IBS.

She's doing fairly well at the moment, though she doesn't want to eat much. I offer her food every couple hours, and sometimes she eats, sometimes she doesn't.

We need to decide whether to take the aggressive, most expensive 20-week treatment option that could give us another 6-9 months or the less aggressive, less expensive 15-week treatment option that would give us 4-6 months.

In the meantime, I'm considering making and selling to order laptop, tablet, e-reader, and phone sleeves to get some funding for it (so we don't have to keep digging into savings). I have a stash of Amy Butler fabrics (3x2+ yards) that are nifty (and I think out of print), which I could probably get a decent amount out of. Plus some remnants. Any of that has to wait until after Dragon Con, though. Too busy trying to finish my armor.

Comments

[heavenscalyx]

I think that there's some anecdata out there that I found that suggests that cats who get a diagnosis of IBS will often, about 6 months later, manifest with lymphoma. That was certainly the case with our Beekman. Because Beekman was 15, we went with the megadose of prednisone. Apparently, if they respond to the pred, they respond immediately, and it can buy you 3 months to a year of remission. If they don't respond to the pred, it makes them MUCH more comfortable. We had the latter experience -- he continued to lose weight, and his tumor kept growing aggressively, but he was loving and ate eagerly until the day he died.

[feuervogel]

Mylene is only 11, and she's in good spirits, except when she's sleeping and tuckered out.

It's frustrating to me, because they did a lot of workup for lymphoma back in March: ultrasound, aspirates. The one possibly suspicious lymph node the radiologist said was normal. So now her disease is advanced enough that megadose prednisone would be hospice care. (She has tumors in the mediastinum and heart.)

[heavenscalyx]

Oh, jeez. That's aggressive as fuck. I'm so sorry. We lost an 8-year-old cat to lymphoma 18 years ago, and all they could offer was the $1100 chemo course, which we, of course, could not NEARLY afford, so I sympathize very much.

[feuervogel]

We have the money to pay for the $5k chemo course (UW-Madison regimen), if we shuffle things around and maybe sell some mutual fund, but how much is it worth the price? Whatever we do will be for us, not for her, you know?

[heavenscalyx]

Yeah. It's an awful choice.

[zombieallomorph]

:(

[feuervogel]

:(

[krait]

Eep! Poor Mylene! My thoughts are with her, and with you guys. D:

[feuervogel]

Thanks :(

[jolantru]

*hugs*

[feuervogel]

Thanks *hugs back*

[ranyart]

Oof. This sounds a lot like what happened with Isis - IBS diagnosis, lymphoma diagnosis a few months (3-4, maybe?) later. Making any kind of decision about care is terrible - how do you weigh cost vs. potential discomfort vs. extra months to spend together?

I'm really sorry. Poor kitten, give her a scritch from me.

[lisefrac.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, hon :( This really sucks.

[blimix.livejournal.com]

That's a wretched situation. *HUGS*