4:33am July 20, 2014

Not all days are good ones.

(Switching to “standard” pronouns in this post because this is a time when I really really can’t deal with flack for using nonstandard ones. For my friends, just substitute the ones you know I prefer when you read this.)

One of my cats has been diagnosed with lymphoma. She’s always been kind of runty— my housemate and I suspect she may have been the runt of her litter— and had some health problems, but she’s been getting more and more of them over the past year and with increasing frequency and losing weight. The vet is pretty sure it’s lymphoma because all the symptoms match and she has a mass in her intestines plus swollen lymph nodes.

We’ll know more on Monday, when she goes in for a lymph node biopsy and some ultrasounds. There is some good news in this. One of them is that lymphoma is one of the most treatable feline cancers, and with most types, the earlier you catch it, the better the prognosis is. Cats with it can and do go into remission, sometimes permanent remission. The other good news is that she is still eating, a lot, and she needs to gain as much weight as possible right now, before she starts any kind of treatment. (One of the problems my 18-year-old cat who died of chronic renal failure some years ago had, was that she had already lost a lot of weight before being diagnosed and starting treatment, and weight loss is one of the biggest hazards for cats with that illness.)

She’s a big fighter. She’s always been a big fighter. She’s gone through respiratory problems, recovered from a torn ligament and gone from walking around on three legs to tearing around the house on four, has a deformed vertebra in her spine and something like minor hip dysplasia but it sure doesn’t slow her down, etc. She tries to bring home lizards half her size (generally playing dead, and we thank her very much for trying to help feed her human family). She’s a cat who absolutely embraces life and all the fun things in it.

My housemate is very close to her, and she’s really more my housemate’s cat than mine. Not only are they very emotionally bonded, she helps out my housemate with her own health issues— meowing and walking on her chest to wake her up if she’s showing signs of getting sleep apnea so she won’t stop breathing in her sleep, or if she’s showing signs of refluxing in her sleep.

The cost is going to be a problem. I have savings accounts that I can draw on, and so does my roommate, but we try to be careful about those because jobs have always been an on-and-off thing for both of us due to disability issues. There’s a chance I might be able to get a long-term one lined up later this year or next year, but I don’t want to hang my hopes on anything before it comes through for sure, and I’ve been burned in the past by jobs that never materialized. Anyway, the thing is, because of all that, my housemate has set up a fundraiser. (The name is a pseudonym because she doesn’t like to use her legal name online for some very valid reasons, but any money donated from it will go straight to her bank account.)

We don’t expect to raise anywhere *close* to the $5000 estimate, so don’t think we’re asking for thousands of dollars or anything— it’s more like “every little bit helps.” The $5000 is more like a worst-case financial scenario for the costs of tests plus treatment. (There was one story my housemate found online from a guy whose cat had feline lymphoma for five years before the vets finally caught it, and was successfully treated and is still alive. It cost him $7000 in the end though, mostly for tests.) If we do somehow manage to meet that goal and the total cost of treatment is under $5000, my housemate and I will do everything we can to refund some money to everyone who donated.

What will help most now is any spare money for the initial round of tests (lymph node biopsy, X-rays and ultrasound) plus emotional support from friends and reminders to take care of myself while all this is going on, because neglecting myself is not going to help her. And this doesn’t mean I won’t contribute what I can to other signalboosts, too. But I think health treatment for companion animals can be every bit as important as it can be for humans, and is especially important when the animal in question serves as both emotional support and health support (in whatever ways they can) to a human.