Last year, her vomiting really ramped up, to the point of being kind of scary. It would take over her whole body, she would go stiff and fall over from the forceful nature of it. We took her to the vet, they did bloodwork, all excellent, and told us it might be a food allergy. They wanted to try that first before we did any expensive x-rays and whatnot.
We changed her food, and the vomiting decreased. BUT. After about a month, she started losing a lot of weight, mostly in a week. LIKE A LOT. We took her to the vet, and they weighed her, and yes she lost 3 pounds. Which, percentage-wise, is huge. Though, at least she was over-weight to begin with, so she was actually at a "healthy" weight, despite not losing it in a healthy way. They did some more bloodwork, again, all good, and gave her an anti-nausea shot and told us that the next thing was an ultrasound.
We take her in for that, and they found a mass near her stomach. Neil approved for some X-rays to be done, to make sure it was just the one mass and it was, so that was the good news. But my poor baby had a cancerous tumor :( The next thing was to take her to a gastroenterologist (for pets! such a thing exists!) to biopsy it and see if they could remove it.
Turns out, since the tumor was on her stomach, removal was out. They took a sample through her stomach (ouchie) and it was lymphoma. They explained everything to us and gave us various options to choose what to do next, one of which was chemotherapy. I'm not going to lie, I voted against it. I had a lot of reasons, one of which it just seemed like a lot to put her through and not be able to explain to her why. Neil said that we had to at least try, to see if she would react positively to it.
This was going to be a once a week vet trip, plus daily pills. Guess who's job the daily pills is. Not the guy who voted for it. I see how that works, guy. Just asking me to do the impossible every day, sure, no problem, I got this.
Her third chemotherapy session was this past Friday, she is still losing a little weight each week, but the vet doesn't seem that concerned about it. Though her red blood count was a little low, they were thinking her tumor might be bleeding a little, so now I get to try to give her a liquid medicine 1 hour before her daily pills. Because that's what I wanted, more things to force down her throat.
Neil takes time off work to go pick her up mid-morning and takes her back home since her treatment is just a few hours. We're hoping to get her chemo moved to Saturday soon so we don't have to get up so early before work.
She spends her time in the computer room upstairs, on top of the dresser and bookcase. We placed food and water, a folded blanket for a bed, litter box, her favorite rug, her penguin toy, a window seat (well, I placed this downstairs in the first room she was secluding herself and was going to move it to her new room, but I saw tha MiSu is actually using it and I hate to change something in case I ruin the reason why they like it), and a cardboard scratcher. I open at least two different kinds of wet food every morning and evening for her, trying to entice her to eat something. I've tried to get her to go to the other rooms, but she freaks out and runs back to her safe spot.
She is still mean as ever, she was cuddling with Neil and then forcefully bit his neck. He is nothing but kind and gentle with all the cats so it's not like me where I do like to annoy them sometimes. So he did NOTHING to deserve it and he was very sad about it. But that's how she has been since forever :/
I'm just hoping all this hassle from both Neil and I will result in a healthy kitty in a few more months!
