Today we received the follow up call from our vet and learned that, yes, the growths removed from our cat were in fact cancerous. Thankfully, they think they removed them all she has been recovering nicely. I know she’s better because she’s back to doing things that drive me crazy like crying when I dare to close myself in the bathroom without her.

Honestly I’m thankful that she’s done so well because her real “problem” is caring too much and I forgot how much I’d missed that. She follows my daughter everywhere like some cat out of an anime, insists that I’ll never sleep alone, and reminds my wife when it’s time for relaxing on the couch. We do our best to love her back in kind but she’s more attentive than we’ll ever hope to be.

The cancer is likely to return someday but until then, I’m thankful for the time I have with her.

Last night was akin to having a newborn in the house.

My wife and I decided the easiest way to calm Cora, and keep an eye on her, was to put our Japanese futon mattresses at the foot of the bed and sleep on floor level with her. That turned out to be true but it also meant dealing with her stumbling around the room half the night, scraping her head along the walls in an attempt to remove her cone. Thankfully, the cone held through all of that so I think we’ll sleep better tonight knowing she can’t get to her stitches and hurt herself.

By 2 am she stopped growling/screaming every time she stood up so we hope this means the healing has actually begun.

We were awakened nearly every hour. It required giving ourselves little pep talks inside our head; “This minute is bad but in the next minute, things will have gotten better, no matter how small the improvement.”

The vet had to remove our cat, Cora’s, mammary glands from her entire left side this morning. One of them had developed a seriously large lump and an x-ray revealed enough spread to conclude the whole set had to go.

Add cat cancer to the long list of suck that’s making up 2020.

Before we could pick Cora up though, the vet needed to prep us over the phone. With COVID-19, clinics now do all of their post-exam consultations via a phone call while you’re sitting in your car in their parking lot. It’s safer but it feels less like telemedicine and more like your pet got in trouble while at a terrible day camp.

The vet informed us that surgery had gone great but her recovery was down to us spending the next nine days preventing one of God’s most independent animals from messing with a first painful, then itchy, line of stitches running down the left side of her chest and past her belly. It is a big deal but it shouldn’t be a big deal, oh and, do you have an empty spare room she could recover in? (Spoilers: We don’t.)

To aid our impossible task, they would stick a cone over her head to prevent her from reaching her stitches or feeling at all normal. Also we could cover her weeping scar with one of the precious baby shirts we’d saved from our daughter’s childhood. Most importantly, the vet stressed three specific things to avoid while she healed:

1. No jumping
2. No running
3. No licking

We assured him we understood, went and picked her up, and managed to break all three of his commandments within a minute of entering the house. Even though we caaaaaarefully took the top off of the carrier as slooooowly as we could, she totally freaked, jumped out of the bottom half, and took off running. Her ever “helpful” sister, Dot, gave chase and pounced on her head cone. Now terrified, Cora ran/jumped up the stairs, stripping off the protective baby shirt so blood could get everywhere in the process, and scrambled under our bed with her sister in hot pursuit.

I somehow I managed to wrangle Dot into another room so we could focus on how we’d get a panicked, wounded cat out from under the middle of a king-sized bed. Thankfully she wasn’t keen on exerting herself any further so she stayed put while we incredible-hulked the mattress off and removed some of the lower spring boards to more easily get to her. After carefully making sure she hadn’t reopened her stitches enough to require going back to the vet, my wife and daughter made up a quiet corner of the room while I puzzled out a way to extract her that didn’t involve further dismantling the bed. I didn’t want to stress her stitches any further so I figured I could use one of our already red beach towels as a makeshift stretcher. I scooted her onto the towel as slowly and methodically as I could and then lifted and balanced her while pulling the towel taught to keep her as flat as possible. It worked well enough but moving a screaming, bleeding cat is high on my “never again” list.

Our fierce hunter wore herself out protecting us from the local songbirds.

📷 The hummingbirds have finally found our feeder. So fun to watch!