Still Hurting Options

[elphiecat]

Needing to get it all out. I guess I'll start at the beginning, and I apologize for the length of this post but I think I need to write out the whole story.

We adopted Elphaba the tortie and Annabelle the tuxedo in March 2005. We named Elphie named after the the "wicked witch" in the book/musical Wicked, because she was a spaz and was definitely the more adventurous and trouble-making of the two. When we checked out the cats at the shelter, she jumped down from the top of the cages to a windowsill and meowed the biggest-mouthed meow at me that I ever saw, especially for a little 7-lb. cat. She then hopped down to the floor and started chewing on a broom that was in the corner. She was missing a collar, and the shelter staff searched all of their cabinets and couldn't find any documentation for this cat, so they made up some new forms for us.

We took her home and found that although she was very adventurous and immediately explored her new surroundings, she was also extremely skittish — if she didn't see your hand coming as you went to pet her, she jumped 3 feet in the air when you made contact. Any sudden noises would send her into hiding. We suspect she used to be stray; she didn't come at the sound of a can opening, she didn't know to stay in one place to be petted (she'd walk by and then turn around and walk by again), and she didn't seem to know about comfy couches until she saw Annabelle lying there, and then you would later see Elphie in the same spot.

Over the years, we gradually built up her trust and she eventually allowed us to snuggle her and give gentle hugs, and she even sometimes rolled over to show us her belly. She no longer immediately ran and hid when she heard visitors coming, and occasionally made a wary appearance at the food bowl in the midst of a party. She became very attached to me (and I to her), and the first time I went away for a week, she showed her distress by urinating on my clothes and on a plastic shoe bag I had in the bottom of the closet. We weren't able to break her of this habit, and rather than put her on valium as our old vet suggested (at only 2 years old!), we got deeper laundry bags and made sure not to leave plastic lying around when we were away.

But it turns out Elphie was too aptly named, and we lost her early. In February 2010, we discovered a bean-sized lump on her left side, just in front of the thigh. Our new vet aspirated it, but results were inconclusive. We decided to wait and watch. By June, it had noticeably grown a bit, and our vet thought it best to remove it and do some testing. When she got in there, she discovered it was deeper than we thought and was partly in the body wall musculature. She removed as much as she felt comfortable doing but couldn't get a clean margin. Testing on the mass showed characteristics much like an aggressive vaccine-related fibrosarcoma. It didn't make sense; it was in a weird spot, and Elphie was so young. The vet referred us to an oncologist.

After several consultations with the oncologist and surgeon and getting X-rays to confirm it hadn't spread to any organs, we ultimately decided not to pursue any further treatment. It had been hard seeing her come home from that first surgery, stitches on bare skin on her side, drowsy and drunk from the anesthesia, and to top it off Annabelle was afraid of her odd smell and behavior and hissed at her for a week. I tried putting the Elizabethan collar on her but couldn't bear watching her confusion and inability to walk without tripping on it, and just opted to keep a close eye on her (I have been lucky to be a student during this time, so that I could be home with her). Because of the location of the tumor, further surgery may have required reconstruction of the body wall or even rib removal, and would require us to keep her in a large crate for two weeks so that she couldn't jump and reopen the wound, and could result in a visible "pouch" on that side of the body depending on how it was reconstructed. And all this for a prognosis of maybe another 2 years, if we included chemotherapy. It just didn't seem worth the suffering she would have to go through, and she wouldn't understand why it was happening to her.

Over the next year, multiple masses reappeared at the surgery site, but she was otherwise acting normal and they did not seem to bother her. Then the rollercoaster began. At the end of April this year, we had to let Rocky, our family dog, go. He was an old American Eskimo at 19, and had been slowly developing arthritis, losing his sight, hearing, mobility, and even ability to swallow. We got him when I was in 6th grade, and I have always been sad that I couldn't be with him more in his final years as I moved away to college and adult life. A week before I met my family for a week in the Poconos, Rocky's kidneys began to fail, and we decided it was time. It was terrible timing; I was at a public event all morning and couldn't properly grieve until I got home. It helped, though, that I had already been away from home for so long and didn't have any daily reminders in my new home, other than an old photo I've had in a frame on my desk. I cried for a couple of days, and then was able to let go and transition to happier memories, and was able to be with my family the week after.

Two weeks later, Elphie had her yearly exam. Everything was fine, other than to keep an eye on the masses because they could rupture. But in the next week, she had suddenly licked all of the fur off of one of the masses. I brought her in to the vet, and they confirmed that the mass may be about to rupture, and put her on a 2-week pain medication. We were leaving to visit my brother in Colorado the next day, so we boarded Elphie at the vet's for that weekend in case it ruptured. It didn't — until we were on the way back home from picking her up. I heard a hiss from the crate, and saw wet fur under the mass but couldn't see much else in the shadows of the carrier. I immediately turned around and brought her back. There wasn't much we could do at that point, other than to give her more pain meds. Ruptured tumors don't heal. She's a feisty one, so we went with an in-ear morphine. She did OK for another week, eating and drinking a little more than usual, mostly hiding behind the futon but sometimes coming out to play and explore a little. On June 14 she threw up a bunch of food; she had done this before so I hoped it didn't mean anything. But the next day she only ate a little bit of food, and the day after that she didn't eat or drink at all, and was spending most of her time hiding under the bed and sleeping. I brought my laptop upstairs so that I could sit with her while she slept. We made her final appointment for the next day.

She used to love going out in our backyard on a leash to eat all the grass out there, and she managed to rouse herself one last time Friday morning (June 17) to go out. It was a gray and buggy morning; she ate a few blades of grass but mostly walked slowly around, and sometimes just stood there, seeming to breathe in the air and just absorb it all. Then she decided it was time to come back in on her own. She never did that before.

Back inside, I made one last attempt to give her some junk food, but she refused it and curled back up to go to sleep. When she did open her eyes, they seemed unfocused and tired. It broke my heart. We brought her to the vet that afternoon, and she still had enough sass in her to resist being put in the carrier, and in her fear at the vet's she was suddenly more wide-eyed and alert, which made our decision all the more difficult. But I knew if we brought her back home she would go back to sleeping and hiding, and the unfocused, tired look would return, and then it was just a waiting game.

I had been reading about the euthanasia process and knew I wanted to be there with her in her last moments, and am very glad we were there. It has been 11 days now, and the rollercoaster has continued. We attended a retirement/graduation celebration the weekend after we let Elphie go, and I put on a brave face but when we were home and Monday came I lost it again. On Wednesday I finally got a paid gig in my new career field, and then that night my husband's grandmother passed away. By the weekend I'd started feeling a little more stable, but the services were Sunday and Monday, and I think it all came back as stories were being told and poems were being read. I've been crying all morning, and all the thoughts and anger at losing her at age 7 to this terrifying cancer have come back.

Like others here, I have been extremely thankful that Lightning Strike and all of your stories are here; I know I am not alone and that helps immensely. Thank you all so much for sharing your stories and wisdom, and for providing a place to let this all out. I know things will get easier; I have had glimpses of that already, and it will help too when my job starts next week and I am not home alone so much. But for right now I needed to get this out, especially since I thought just a few days ago that I was finally adjusting, and then it all fell apart again and this morning hurt just as much as day one.

Thank you all so much for just being here.