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Aug. 12th, 2019 08:26 pmWell today's been shitty. Went to the oncologist. He discussed the three major options with us, those being surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Of the three surgery is impossible because of the location of the cancer, chemotherapy has a very low likelihood of doing anything, and radiation has a 75% chance of shrinking the tumors but can also cause burns and other side effects and even if it does shrink the tumors, would only give two to five months of good quality of life. And given how fast this all happened I'm going on the two month side.
I feel like our instincts are good on this. (And the oncologist didn't disagree.) We watched Mikey get his eyebrow "fatty" (still think it was mast cell) tumor grow back over seven to eight years, and we suspect it'll take that long for the mast cell tumor to reappear on his innards rather than in small lumps on his skin where it's commonly found but won't do any real harm. We chose surgery and a drug treatment daily for the rest of his life rather than surgery and chemotherapy, and I think we made a good choice there. His bloodwork is fine every checkup, he's regained his weight.
And in this case our instincts are saying, she lost 10/14.5 pounds in six weeks. Over the course of one week she developed a larger tumor in her mouth that's making it cumbersome to eat, but it doesn't seem to be causing her any pain. (She was purring under the hands of the oncologist, which amused him.) Over the three weeks it took us to get in to the oncologist a couple large tumors either developed or grew much much larger. So our instincts are saying she's not going to last much longer.
So. That happened today. Oncologist confirmed, it's bad, it's aggressive, there's not much we can do except make her comfortable. We got home and found a fairly fat rat in the house. Shrieking. Presumably because, you know, cats staring at it and smacking it occasionally. We put it outside for the foxes and raccoons. And then while I was telling my Mom the bad news I stepped on a large fucking staple and now my heel is covered in a bloody bandage.
This is a wonderful start to the week.
I feel like our instincts are good on this. (And the oncologist didn't disagree.) We watched Mikey get his eyebrow "fatty" (still think it was mast cell) tumor grow back over seven to eight years, and we suspect it'll take that long for the mast cell tumor to reappear on his innards rather than in small lumps on his skin where it's commonly found but won't do any real harm. We chose surgery and a drug treatment daily for the rest of his life rather than surgery and chemotherapy, and I think we made a good choice there. His bloodwork is fine every checkup, he's regained his weight.
And in this case our instincts are saying, she lost 10/14.5 pounds in six weeks. Over the course of one week she developed a larger tumor in her mouth that's making it cumbersome to eat, but it doesn't seem to be causing her any pain. (She was purring under the hands of the oncologist, which amused him.) Over the three weeks it took us to get in to the oncologist a couple large tumors either developed or grew much much larger. So our instincts are saying she's not going to last much longer.
So. That happened today. Oncologist confirmed, it's bad, it's aggressive, there's not much we can do except make her comfortable. We got home and found a fairly fat rat in the house. Shrieking. Presumably because, you know, cats staring at it and smacking it occasionally. We put it outside for the foxes and raccoons. And then while I was telling my Mom the bad news I stepped on a large fucking staple and now my heel is covered in a bloody bandage.
This is a wonderful start to the week.