im in ur tub drinkin ur watur

So I had a bout of fortyitis this week: tight hamstrings, sore back. I'm lurching around the office all day, creaking when I stand up after dinner. I get home, realize the lawn probably should be mowed today (either today or Sunday, after I get home, so yeah, today).

Mow the lawn, relax on the sectional, and realize that I might want to do something before my legs bend up into little Vs. Hard to drive if you can't reach the pedals. I read up, decide on heat, and opt for a bath.

I realize it's been a while since I took a bath at home because it takes a while to fill the tub. I get in, stretch my legs a little, and sure enough, Cat #1 comes up to visit. (She is a big fan of the tub because it has water, and she likes to drink water.)

I'm relaxing, playing solitaire on my iPhone, and suddenly I hear lap ... lap ... lap. I look over, and there is Cat #1, carefully leaning over into the tub and drinking. Not from the faucet. From the water in the tub. The water I'm in.

I move a little, which makes a little wave and breaks the cat's concentration. She backs up, I settle down, and once again, lap ... lap ... lap.

I'm embarrassed. I mean, what if someone saw this? (Aside, of course, from the horrible specter of me in the water.) I have a perfectly good water fountain that, in fact, has fresh water in it RIGHT NOW. Cold, fresh water. And this cat is drinking hot bathtub water. Not warm, mind you. I don't do warm. (Fortunately, no soap this time.)

I really don't understand cats sometimes.

What? What do you want? Why do you keep touching me?

Meow.

That's what I came home to today. Now, that's not at all out of the ordinary: as long as I get home on time, I get a meow. Sometimes I get two, but usually Josie only meows if I ask her to.

Today was different.

Meow.

Meow.

This was clearly a "Feed me, you idiot" meow, except that both bowls already had food. (Explanation: two cats, two bowls. Regular people bowls, because at one point we thought maybe Calle was reacting to the bowls I had before. Of course Calle eats out of both of them, but I try. It also enables me to keep more food out when I'm gone overnight. When Calle finally explained that the old food was crap and this new food was wonderful, I'd figured it out by replacing the food in just one bowl, so the other bowl is still the old food. There are starving cats in China and all that.)

So I walk her to the food and leave her. After all, there's food in both bowls.

Meow.

Meow.

Now, to be fair, at one point, this wasn't "Meow, this food has aged more than 8 hours, I will not eat it" but rather "Meow, I'd love to eat this food, but I have intestinal cancer, and I really don't feel like eating at all", so I really can't dismiss any of it completely. But it still sounded like the former.

Back and forth. I play with her food a little – look, kitty, new food! – but to no avail.

Finally, I put a splash (figurative, because they're on dry food) in the good bowl.

Calle deigns to eat some.

High-maintenance cat. (Literally. Have you seen my credit card bills?) Where would she get that trait?

Uh, don't answer that.

Calle 1, cancer 0

As is too often the case, good news is infrequently reported here; bad news generally hits the front page. Allow me to change that today.

Calle and I came back from the clinic today. She had chest X-rays and an ultrasound today, and everything came back clean - no sign of anything bad. Naturally, there are no guarantees, but for now, things are as good as we could imagine. She's healthy, happy (except for this morning: not keen on fasting or going to the clinic), and just a little lighter (I'm not saying she had a pound or two to lose prior to this stuff ...).

Her next appointment is in the middle of March, just to see how things are going. If that goes well, we'll do another one six months down the road or so. For now, things look good.

One nice thing to all this is that it served as a reminder to me that all cats will eventually die, even mine, and I need to be prepared for that. That may not sound like a "nice" thing, but it's important to understand how life works. Enjoy the time you have with your cats, and when that time is up, remember your cat well.

Oh, yes, the cat

We had a minor scare recently. Calle went in for her (hopefully) last dose of chemo last week, and the tech noticed she was lighter than usual and more scared, down a pound or so. The oncologist checked her out thoroughly and found nothing, blood test came back fine, so we didn't know what was up.

This week, she did seem to be more of a lap cat (bad sign, if it means less energy), but she was still chasing after Josie; jumping on the counter poorly, but still doing it. So tonight, in addition to dry food, I put out a can of wet food.

Suddenly, the cat disappears and is replaced by a transmogrifier, and before my very eyes, cat food becomes a nitrogen/oxygen mix. I think I even heard a pop from the vacuum that the air filled.

Looks like she just decided not to like that dry food any more. sucks for me. Fortunately, I have some of the wet food left, and it's easy to get more.

Also, I've apparently discovered for the (n+1)th time that I'm allergic/sensitive to cigarette smoke. Not much of a big deal - I wait for symptoms, go to prompt care, get my meds, wait it out - except that friends are coming over to play Rock Band and stuff tomorrow, and the Expert-level singer is out of commission.

Drums, here I come.

How to catch a cat

If you have a cat, you know how difficult it is to catch. A cat's first step is much faster than yours, and it's not possible to reach down in time to grab the cat if it wants to take off, so if you need to catch it, you must get within arm's length before even thinking about catching it, and even then it's 50/50.

Today was another chemo appointment - well, blood work + chemo, because they didn't draw blood in between like they're supposed to, and I forgot until it was too late - so I did my normal late-morning routine. There have been enough of these now that the cats know something's up when I'm home early (at one point, Calle was going under the bed every morning just to be safe), so even though they greet me at the door, they're ready to run at a moment's notice.

This time, it was a little different. Both cats were sleeping in the bedroom, so they were standing near the bed when I saw them: Calle at the foot, Josie next to it. I did a quick calculation and estimated the chances of me catching Calle with a lunge at something like 0%.

I began to walk slowly toward her, no arms outstretched or anything, trying not to think of anything, least of all the clinic and the cat carrier. I got within about 6 feet before Calle did the same thing: realizing that my chances were now greater than 0%, she turned and began to go under the bed.

In the past, when she'd meet me at the door, the first thing I'd do would be to close the bedroom door. My bed is pretty low to the floor, so I can't get under it. Other than that, there's really no place in the house where I can't get a cat if I need to. (I couldn't do that today because they never left the bedroom.) The end result is that I have to move both the mattress and box spring, which basically adds 10 minutes, 15 if I'm not careful with the covers.

However, the bed is also low enough that she can't just walk underneath it: she has to squeeze down a little bit, and that's what saved me. As I saw her duck down and start to disappear under the blankets hanging off the end of the bed, I apparently leapt forward (my knee informed me I'd done this later) and lunged under the bed.

Unlike Madden AI, instead of aiming for where the cat had been, I aimed for where the cat would be. Grabbing a cat by the hind legs will get you nothing if you're lucky, and a skin graft if you're not. Instead, as my arm disappeared under the bed, my hand found a cat chest. I scooped her back out from the bed, picked her up, and eventually coaxed her into the carrier. (By "coaxed" I mean "kept her in front of me and moved the carrier forward until she was already halfway in it.")

Owner 1, Cat 0. (Total score at this point: Owner 24, Cat 37,844.)

Low red count

Calle passed her first blood test. The second one was today, with chemo scheduled for tomorrow.

The hospital called me back today. Turns out her red blood cell count was about half of the lowest acceptable level, so we canceled the appointment. I've got antibiotics to give her, and next week, she'll go back in for another blood test. If that's okay, we can proceed with chemo.

Naturally, she doesn't care. Looks like the same old Calle, except with a bit less fur (the stomach fur is starting to grow back; the neck and leg won't stay regrown until we're done because they need the leg for chemo and the neck for blood work).

Well, she probably won't like 14 doses of antibiotics. Neither will I. I did get a useful tip, though. We'll see how it works out.

Cross your paws ...

Well, the surgery went very well. The incision healed fine, the E-collars are off, and the staples are out. There was much washing that first day, when she got to keep the collars off for good (I let her wash the fur areas every now and then, but she had to stay away from the incision).

Her energy was coming back even as the E-collars were on, so she's pretty close to normal now. That's good, considering that she also began chemo on Friday. (This was new to me: unlike in people, where they can ramp it up because you know what's going on, in cats, chemo is more for controlling whatever might be out there. A cat in pain because of cancer and a cat in pain because of chemo are essentially in the same spot.) There isn't anything noticeable right now, but because this turned out to be something a little bit different (pancreatic, and there are other words that go with it that may or may not have been what I posted before), this is to keep down whatever else may be trying to grow. There will be six three-week cycles, alternating between two medicines, with blood draws 10 and 20 days after chemo.

It was pretty quick, maybe just 20 minutes, and thankfully administered by IV and not yours truly. Got her back in the crate, back home, and within minutes, she was eating and pulling at the bandage on her leg. (I felt dumb when, after the hour they say to wait, I went to take it off and there was no bandage on the leg. She'd already removed it herself. No thanks, Dad, already took care of that.)

No real side effects, partly because of the low dosage. The one thing that happens sometimes is that whiskers fall out (their equivalent to our hair, stuff that keeps growing). Not yet, not that I've seen. Also, you're supposed to handle waste carefully, because for the first 72 hours, they can pass active medication. (Fortunately, I already react to cat urine, so I've got gloves just for that purpose.)

Things have gone as well as I could have hoped. The only real change, besides the fur that's slowly growing back, is that now that Calle has her energy back, she's not so keen on hanging out with Josie. Apparently all that closeness before was just that she didn't have the energy to move away. :)

Home again, home again

Calle's home now. Everything's going well, except that she's wearing one of those collars that prevents cats from getting at their stitches/staples.

For about an hour, that is. She lay down by the guitars, and as I was typing, I heard a papery kind of "pop" sound, and there was a cat with no collar. Oops. I quickly put it back on, but it makes me wonder if it'll stay on during the day. Hopefully, she'll keep it on during the day today, and then will be less tempted to try to remove it tomorrow.

I have a few meds to give her, two that she gets every 12 hours and one every 8 hours. We'll see how much stronger she is now than before: even when I was putting the collar back on her, she was resisting pretty well. I suspect that in two weeks, once the staples are out, she'll be running around at full speed again.

Josie's not quite sure what to make of this. I took away a quiet cat and brought back a noisy cat, one that rustles every time it moves. She's not so cool with this. She'll probably think better of it when she realizes that she'll get the bed to herself (no jumping, remember).

Once again, good news to this point ...

Looking good so far ...

For the first time in I don't know how long, I was 30 minutes early to work.

The appointment was very quick. The surgeon checked on Calle, talked a bit about what we would do and what the risks were (he was the fact-dispenser to match the oncologist's hope-dispensation), I left her with an assistant, and that was that. He said they'd call if there were problems prior to surgery (if chest X-rays showed stuff in the lungs or heart cavity), and if not, they'd call after surgery.

It's also been a long time since I wanted the phone not to ring. :)

10:53, right after my 10:30 ends, I get a call on my work phone. (Docs know this stuff - yeah, you say "cell phone, cell phone," but when was the last time your work phone was dead?) Everything's fine so far. She was very good during surgery (naturally), no visible signs of cancer other than the mass itself. They took it out, got her into recovery, and that's all for now. She'll stay over the weekend, and then I'll have a list of instructions on Monday or Tuesday.

There's a possibility that there could be more cancer that is too small to detect, and the oncologist will come up with a post-surgery plan, so there is another phase (short or long, hard to tell at this point), but for now, things seem to be going very, very well.

A New Hope

Now I think I should have paid more attention when my relatives were going through this stuff. (I don't think any of them had intestinal cancer, though.)

We met with the oncologist Friday. Calle liked this office better: they have shag carpeting on the exam tables. In fact, she didn't want to go back in the carrier at first. He agreed that there was a mass, thought it might be intestinal, and wanted to get some cells from it. They kept her for the afternoon, took some samples and an ultrasound, and sent off the samples for analysis.

The ultrasound showed that the mass was in the intestinal area, but it's still not certain. We got results today, and it looks like it's intestinal adenocarcinoma. (Almost at the bottom of the page.)

So Calle has an appointment tomorrow morning. The surgeon is going to consult with us, examine her briefly, and then do a chest X-ray just to make sure it's not spread to the chest cavity. If it hasn't, then they'll put her under the knife. She'll probably be home Monday.

All things considered, there is definitely cause for optimism. I am hoping for the best.

The Best Cat Ever

Except, of course, for your own. (With apologies to Cleveland Amory, from whom I shamelessly stole the line. There is, however, an old saw that suggests that the first time one steals a line, it's quoted directly; the second time, it's quoted indirectly; the third time, it's delivered as if one's own. If such is the case, I shall quote two more times so that we may proceed.)

Calle has cancer.

Someone with a greater insistence for accuracy might say that we think she has cancer, that it could be something else, that the outcome may still be in doubt, or any of the other things with which people in this situation usually comfort themselves. Although I've never been through this with a cat of my own (or more accurate, in my own house, because cats are never really one's own), I have been through it with people, and in such cases, it is always best to accept the truth internally and hope for the best externally.

We have an appointment with an oncologist next Friday. What we will discover is that the vet is correct, and that it is relatively advanced, and that at this point, we should allow Calle the feline equivalent of tidying up her affairs. (I shall not ask her to whom she wills her possessions. I expect she would rather see them thrown away than given to that cat, so we shall not ask, and Josie will have use of the ones she likes. Or, perhaps, she will not like any of them at all.)

On May 1 (or perhaps April 30), for no apparent reason, I suddenly realized that Calle was older than I'd thought. (Of course, I really hadn't thought much about it.) I went back through mentally – almost five years in the house, some time in the apartment, however long she'd lived with Kristen – and came up with 8 or so. I then checked my leases (oh yes, I had not cleaned them up yet) and found five years' worth. So she's 12 or 13, something like that. Not so bad, but not a youngish cat. A middle-aged cat. (This was a sudden thought, that's all.)

I visit college friends in the spring/summer, usually over Memorial Day weekend. When I returned, it seemed that the cats had been on a hunger strike. Purina had introduced a new flavor of Purina One, and since flavor A was so good, perhaps flavor B also would be good. Alas, it was not, so flavor A made its return.

Except that it really didn't. For some reason, not a lot of food was being eaten, and there was more meowing. Why? Of course, it's hard to tell. However, challenges had come and gone, and there were no other signs that I could see, so this too might pass.

There was also more sleeping (how can you tell? Well, it's hard – more a feeling than anything else). But it didn't really seem to be that big of a deal.

Then, Sunday night, I think, I was in the kitchen for some reason, and I saw that the food bowls were fairly full, and that, come to think of it, I hadn't filled them for a while. (Josie does not eat much. She's a small cat.) For no reason, I picked a kibble out of the bowl and tossed it toward Calle, who was by the refrigerator. She ate it awkwardly but greedily. Another kibble, same result.

Hmm. Not so good. Probably some tooth thing that I missed, or perhaps sores (she's allergic to something, and every now and then it appears; we take her in, get her a steroid shot, and it goes away). So I toss another one, and she kind of nibbles at it, but doesn't eat it.

I have treats in the cupboard. They're softer. I get a couple out and put them down. Gone in a flash. Not a good sign at all. So I feed her some treats, slowly, so as not to upset her stomach. (It didn't work, by the way.)

Well, she hasn't been eating, so we'll take her in to see the vet. Out of curiosity, I decide to weigh her. You know, additivity: weigh myself, weigh me and the cat, subtract me.

I step on the scale. 189. (Thankfully, it was evening and I was fairly well dressed. I still have weight to lose, but this is not my story.)

I pick up cat and step on the scale. 198.

198.

Nine pounds. Calle's last recorded weight was 12 pounds. I know this like you know when your child was last sick enough to see the doctor. You do not need to be good at math to see a problem here.

Then, when I step off the scale, Calle suddenly lunges out of my hands, lands awkwardly, and runs off. Also not good signs. She landed much like I would land if I jumped down from a height of four feet or so, not at all catlike. Also, for some reason, when I hold a cat (always left hand under the front legs), my right hand doesn't support the legs, but rather lifts the cat to nestle in the crook of my elbow, perhaps supporting the cat's midsection.

So I get a little more food into Calle and resolve to call the vet tomorrow morning.

Happily, they have an afternoon appointment. (Strangely, I work about 5 minutes from the vet, but 25-30 from home, so I have a 60-minute round trip to get the cat.) Cleverly, I close the bedroom door: Calle predictably makes a break when she sees me home during the day, realizes her best hiding places are unavailable, turns and jogs back into the living room, only to remember it looks roughly like a sports bar on a Wednesday afternoon. I pick her up, put her into the crate (thanks to Paul for suggesting the top-of-the-crate-removal trick - record time for cat insertion), and off we go.

There's not much meowing in the car or at the vet.

They can see us right away. I'm running about 3 minutes late. Not bad for a 60-minute trip with cat retrieval included.

Naturally, the first thing we do is weigh the cat. (You know the drill.)

7 pounds.

Not 7.9 pounds, or even 7.4 pounds.

7 pounds.

I am an intelligent man, and I have seen bad things before. I do not know much about cats other than as a faithful companion, but I know enough to recognize that when a cat loses almost 50% of its body weight in any period of time, something is wrong, and it is not a tooth problem.

The vet tech and I trade pleasantries and hedge upward: even though I know, and she must know (because she's looking at Calle's chart, because Calle has been there for every vet trip since I took care of her), we decide her last measured weight was 11 pounds, even though it's not.

So the vet comes in and is given this news, and the symptoms (not eating much, peeing less often, pooping less often, no visible diarrhea, no other visible symptoms), and of course he does the correct vet thing and checks into it himself, even though he suspects that he will have to explain something rather soon.

Blood tests to come. They shave a patch of her fur (bless her heart, she still has thick fur, even if it's short) and draw blood (I look away). Temperature, normal. He examines her. Head, no problems. Belly.

"I don't like that." Something in the abdomen. X-rays to come.

So it can be a number of things: you know, or possibly a kidney problem, or something else. The X-rays may or may not tell us.

The X-rays come back. It is not a kidney problem, not unless your kidneys hide behind your ribcage. Her kidneys are clearly not where this mass is, nor is her spleen there. Where it is is where no mass has any business being in a healthy cat.

So. It looks like intestinal lymphoma. If you don't know what that is, it is not difficult to explain. Like in humans, the lymphatic system in cats is pretty much everywhere: therefore, if you have cancer in your lymphatic system, it did not just knock on your door and offer to sell you a nice magazine subscription. It has made itself at home, and has invited some of its friends, and it has eaten your favorite ice cream and forgotten to set the DVR for MythBusters.

Of course, it is not always like that. There are degrees of malignancy in cats as there are in humans, but a low-grade tumor does not cause a cat to lose five pounds. Not this cat, the one who would eat Pop-Tart pieces, or lettuce, or, well, anything not too spicy that happened to fall on the floor, or on a napkin, or onto your plate, even if it hadn't fallen quite yet, but could have if she weren't watching it so closely for you.

To the vet's credit (and I expected no less from him; he has always done well by my cats and has always told me exactly what's going on), there was no hedging. I asked a couple of questions and he confirmed them.

So we will see the oncologist next Friday, and he will tell me that it is a high-grade tumor, and we will discuss options to improve her quality of living, and I will probably thank him for all of his help, and go back to the vet, and schedule Calle for some periodic steroid shots (this seems to help with the symptoms), every week or two, or something like that, and then, you know, it will be time.

Calle has been the best cat I have ever had, in nearly four decades of cat companionship, and I have treasured every moment we have shared together. I could not ask for anything more than for her last days to be as good for her as the other days have been for me.