Critter report

Well, it has been piled on this week. I had noticed some spots of blood here and there around about since Saturday night, but couldn’t find which cat it was coming from. It didn’t seem to be enough to get really concerned about. Then after the cats ate breakfast, Guido laid down on the floor in a kind of odd way and I thought his fur looked weird. On closer inspection he had a quarter-sized hard lesion on his side with blood oozing out of the middle. I immediately thought spider bite and took him to the vet.

The vet found that he had a huge dark bruise about the size of a softball around the lesion and was concerned about blood inflammation. She thought that it was either a brown recluse bite or a tumor. I brought him home after he’d been on an IV all day and he looked scary – she had taken biopsies and sutured his wound, and it was still oozing. Plus she showed me x-rays that showed several kidney stones, one of which had just entered his urethra and there is a possibility that it might block it. She said that it was delicate surgery if that happened and a specialist would need to do it.

Then she called me Tuesday night and said that it was definitely cancer, and that it likely was aggressive and in the bloodstream. She would know more when the biopsies came back.

So Guido got a lot of attention on Wednesday, but he was trotting around and eating as if there was nothing wrong with him.

In the middle of the night on Wednesday, Theo started throwing up, but that is not too unusual for him. I tossed him off the bed and didn’t worry about it. I woke up with a wicked headache and noticed that Theo wasn’t bugging me to get up. He didn’t show up for breakfast. He didn’t come when I shook the cat treat bag. I couldn’t find him. I was trying very hard not to panic because Theo has never missed a meal. Then I went to the litterbox to scoop it out, and there was blood all over it. I had a meltdown. I didn’t know if the blood was from Guido or Theo. He finally came out of hiding and he was smacking his lips and throwing up white foam. I tried to give him a cat treat with famotidine in it and he wouldn’t eat it. I tried to force it on him and that didn’t go well. So I had to wait an hour for him to calm down and I took him to the vet.

He spent the day at the vet getting x-rays and tests and IV fluids and barium. The blood was definitely from him. We finally assumed that it was from this weekend when one of the cats managed to get into the cabinet and drag some chicken bones out of the garbage can. That $6.99 rotisserie chicken cost me $818 today.

He is laying beside me now with a catheter in his leg and a cone collar on his neck. This is not a happy kitty. He is very out of it. I’ll take him back in in the morning. I hope that he will eat something tonight because he will start to feel better with a little something on his stomach, and there are some probiotics that I need to sprinkle on his food. I don’t want to freak him out any more – he seems almost catatonic.

I did get some good – well, better, anyway – news about Guido. The biopsies did not show any malignancy or metastasis. It doesn’t mean that there is none, but the tumor is probably benign and the doctor can excise the main part of it on Dec. 20 when I was to take him back to get his stitches out. Before she had said that if it was cancer she would have to take out a much larger area and if that had been the case we were looking at euthanasia instead.

As it is, euthanasia is not out. But it is much less likely than it was.

Whew. I am worn from all this stress, but I’m not in a panic now.

Update: Theo spent another day at the vet, but he is doing much better today (three days later).