Ward round at Saint-Random Hospital

Neuroticat a few hours after her operation, distinctly unimpressed.

Poor little Neuroticat has had a rough time of it recently. We discovered a lump on her leg that seemed to have sprung up from nowhere and grew at an alarming rate. We took her to the vet's, who biopsied it. The sample came back inconclusive but her blood test also threw up that Neuroticat had hyperthyroidism. Which explained her hyperactivity, general shoutiness and low weight. She'd been like that for a year -- see my previous post on the matter -- but perhaps they didn't look for her thyroid hormone levels. Now it all seemed terribly important. I wanted to have that horrible thing carved out of her thigh as quickly as possible. The vets said, oh no, can't possibly operate with her thyroid high, we can't risk the anaesthesia. Oh please. So we were told to ram 10mg of Carbimazole down her throat every day for a month, which stressed out our little kittie no end and which also made her sick a lot, which stressed me out. Finally, we finished the course of Carbimazole and while the vet, a different one this time, hummed and haaed, OH and I put our collective foot down: operate on her before that tumour chews up everything. So he did.

The news was meh: it was a fibrosarcoma, a soft-tissue cancer, the prognosis "guarded". He couldn't get it all out or it would have made her lame. Well duh, thanks for waiting long enough for that to happen. At least no visible metastases on the chest x-ray. Perhaps they felt bad about making us wait so long because they didn't charge us for the x-ray. Normally, you'd take the whole leg off with a cancer like that, but that goes for a much younger cat, not for the 17-year-old lady we've got here, ancient in human years. It might buy us a few more months with her at least, perhaps even longer. With the new iodine-free medicated cat food she is getting, perhaps her lowered thyroid levels will stop turbo-fuelling the growth. In any case, it's quality-of-life for her and us as far as we're concerned from now on. The op was nearly a fortnight ago and her wound is healing well. She's out of the buster collar, which she absolutely hated, and bouncing around and vocalising like normal, bless her.

She made both of us laugh at the vet's, pre-op. The vet wanted to check if her heartbeat was slow enough. "She gets very anxious in unfamiliar surroundings," we had warned him previously, "she's a little stress bunny." Yeah right. She was a loudly purring furry ball of putty in his hands, to the point where he removed the stethoscope and said, "I can't hear her heartbeat over her purr, it's really loud." He had to have several goes with a tissue soaked in white spirit to irritate her sufficiently so that she shut up for a wee while. Good girl.