Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Icey wasn’t looking quite as pink and plucky this week, so we took her in for a blood check.

I haven’t updated with the previous news, which was that her red blood cell count was up in the 30s and the vet was very pleased with her progress. I thought that I might jinx it by putting the words here. Maybe I should have anyway.

Her red blood count was down a little bit, to 28. Not too bad. Her white count was high though – the vet wanted to send the blood sample to the lab. She called back the next day. “I have terrible news,” she said, and the world sank. Icey has acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Her white count was 150,000 – 130,000 of which were cancer cells. She does not recommend treatment.

“Acute lymphocytic leukemia is treated with the same protocol as lymphoma, but only ~25% of cats obtain remission. For those that obtain remission, the average length is 7 mo.” The Merck Veterinary Manual.

We just have a few weeks, if that, left with our kitty. She’s six years old and looks at least twice that. Her muscles have wasted away all over – behind her eyes, along her spine, even on her nose. A friend who hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks was shocked at her appearance. But she’s still lying here at my side, one paw stretched out to touch me as she sleeps. I’m really going to miss her.

Quick note to say that Icey is hanging in there. The vet was more optimistic about her PCV last week (18%), and in fact thought she was doing well enough to start treatment (Atopica, a.k.a. cyclosporine) to knock down her immune system, which will keep it from attacking her bone marrow. That might giver her a chance to regenerate marrow and blood cells. As with our dog, a relapse could come at any time, so we’re treating each day as a gift. So she’s taking 6 different pills every day, and every day I get more ventilated, but that’s okay! 🙂

On the other hand, Max ended up getting up getting some sort of stomach ailment and had to spend the night on an IV at the vet getting meds and fluids. Another $700 dollars, kasplat. He had a little relapse yesterday but not as bad. What the hell did I do to anger the cat gods?

Here’s the tribute that Michelle Senderhauf and I did at this year’s ARGFest:

I spent a long day at the vet office today. It’s a specialty hospital, meaning the regular cases don’t normally go there, only the stuff that everyday vets can’t treat. Icey’s condition – aplastic anemia – certainly qualifies.

I didn’t have a good feeling going in. Icey felt feverish and she was lethargic. In the carrier she was hiding, when normally she would be wanting to see out. Maybe that’s why, despite repeating “1:30” to myself all morning as a reminder of the appointment time, I ended up thinking at the last minute that the appointment was for 2. I ended up getting there at 1:45 – not really late, huh?

But I waited a long time. And waited some more, my dread building. I knew the test results were going to suck. When I brought her home on Monday, her PCV (packed cell volume) was 25% (normal is at least 35%) and had been stable overnight. I thought to myself, as long as it was over 20%, things would be okay. Deep down, I didn’t think it would be.

A woman came in, holding her limp Shih-Tzu. Screaming that it was an emergency. They rushed the dog to the back. The woman was in hysterics, sobbing, stomping her feet, begging her son over the phone not to tell her husband. She’d left the dog outside in the sun in the 100+ degree heat for almost an hour, and it had heatstroke. I was still waiting to see the doctor, over an hour past the original appointment time.

They walked out a yellow lab, his front legs shaved where they had had IVs and blood drawn, his side shaved where there was a wound. What a similarity there was to Cuervo, when he was sick and got attacked by a deer. The vet spoke with the dog’s owner in a hushed voice in the corner of the room. The woman quietly cried. My head pounded. Someone was calling my name, once, twice. Finally I heard. It was the doctor.

She took Icey back to draw blood. I waited again. I was getting good at this, the waiting. The sick, sour feeling in my stomach almost felt normal. I didn’t think it would take this long for a simple blood draw. Managed to play a game on my phone. Did a couple of laps around the room. Developed supernatural hearing skills to listen for steps coming down the hall. The doctor was quiet, but I heard her before she opened the door. “I can’t get any blood out of your cat,” she told me. Icey was fighting them at every turn, biting and scratching. Totally uncharacteristic of her. She was running a fever. The best thing to do would be to put her in a tank with gas for sedation. While they were at it, they could do the bone marrow aspiration we thought about doing over the weekend and get an IV catheter ready in case she needed another blood transfusion. Transfusion number three. I agreed. Left her there.

The call came when I was playing Guitar Hero with my daughter. Two different doctors tried six times to get bone marrow. She had no marrow to get. Her body had attacked it all, killed it all. Her PCV was down to 14%. Her chance of survival, even with several weeks of very aggressive treatment, is under 15%. The vet was very sorry.

They’re doing one last transfusion so Icey will feel better for a little while, and I’ll bring her home tomorrow. When she starts to feel bad again, it will be time to end her suffering.

The worst part is that I feel like I could have avoided all this if I had done more research about pet vaccination. Why didn’t I, after my dog died? The study is right there. Why do we only do one round of shots for our kids, but we vaccinate pets yearly? Studies have shown that pet vaccinations last for years. I thought that Icey just had a little granuloma from her Rabies vaccination, but that was the herald of something horrible for her and for my family. Not to mention the cost – well over $3000 so far (and over $5000 for Cuervo’s treatment).

Fighting the system in place that declares yearly vaccinations to be right and necessary is David vs. Goliath. So I’ll just comfort my kids and my other kitty and when Icey is gone, miss that funny cat who would always try to clean up messes and who would jump on the bed every night with a happy chirp.

This morning Icey was under my daughter’s bed, on her side, unmoving. My husband thought she was dead, and she nearly was. I rushed her to the emergency vet. Temperature was 90 – normal 101. Hematocrit of 4.8%, normal is 35%. Every number in her CBC is FUBAR.

They think she’s developed an autoimmune blood disorder, or she had one that was exacerbated, due to the vaccines she received earlier this month.

The exact same thing happened to my dog in 2007. He fought bravely and lost.

This is making me question the safety and sanity of pet vaccines. I’ve not even brought up the fact that I lost four cats to kidney failure in four years – and there’s a link there, too. So what’s the lesser of two evils?

Spare a thought for a sweet little kitty who likes things tidy and always keeps my elbow warm.

I have a dream every few months in which I’m sitting in an airplane. The plane always has an unusual seating configuration, not always identical, but it is wide across, and only a few rows, in a full sized plane. After we take off, there’s always trouble, from flight gear problems to full fledged crash. What on earth does that mean?

Last night I was in a plane that had maybe 10-15 people sitting across, but only about 10 rows. It was mostly empty. I was happy because I was in a bulkhead row, so I had a ton of leg room. I stuck my bag under the seat caddy corner to the left of me. The flight attendant then came on and said she needed to add a row, so she swung one into position right in front of me. We took off and developed engine trouble right after – had to land immediately. I wondered if I had accidentally left my cell phone on and caused the issue. Resolved to turn it off as subtly as possible so that nobody would arrest me.

I wasn’t really surprised when it happened. After all, I’d been having the dreams for years. A slow drift up, a kicking off, and I was afloat. Like air was water. Like I was on the moon.

Most people, when they have flying dreams, imagine themselves zipping high through the air, looking down at the ant-like specks of people below. Zooming, like a jet. Targeted. Ballistic. Not me. I dream-fly in lazy, languid arcs, a casual flick off whatever stationary object is nearby used to change my trajectory. More a low-gravity leap than flight, really.

And so the day after the night of a week’s culmination of insomniac tossings and turnings in bed, my consciousness itself was drifting in one of those lazy arcs. I felt caught between the tasks of the day and the siren song of the snippet of dream from the night before (or was it two nights ago?) – I was arm in arm with a friend, and we were skipping in long, powerful leaps across the — oops?

As I daydreamed, I tripped. As I tripped, my dream memory took over and I instinctively leapt. As I leapt, I stayed afloat in the air, wide eyed, afraid to look down in fear that I would encounter Wile E. Coyote Syndrome and reality would come, literally, crashing around my ears.

I extended a leg. Pointed it earthwards. Came drifting gracefully, if a bit wobbly, down. Looked around. Nobody notices anything in this damned city. I’m undetected for now.

So now what? I can float through the air. What sort of heroic incredible power is that? What am I supposed to use it for? I mean, something like this, I should be wearing a cape and have a fancy pseudonym and join a consortium of similarly-enhanced individuals, right? Because to be honest, all I want to do is go out on a moonlit night to the park and jump, and jump, and jump.

What’s this all about? Visit My Super First Day to find out.

The problem with finding a good book is that, when it’s over, I go through a sort of grieving process. For the characters and the story. I miss them and wonder how they’re doing. And I want to have another experience like that again, where I get so incredibly involved in someone else’s world for a while, but the prospect of kissing frogs while searching for a prince is just so daunting that I have grown ever more hesitant to pick up another book. So the more books I’ve read that I love, contrarily, the less likely I am to take a chance on another book. An overall trend, perhaps, of wanting to stay comfortable in my own little zone?

What’s got me all angsty, you might wonder? I just finished The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield and even though I knew I was hastening it towards its end, I couldn’t put it down. Instead of getting out of bed this morning and brushing my teeth, I picked up my book and carried on from where I left off last night when I fell asleep reading. For a girl who grew up reading and re-reading Jane Eyre, it was absolutely wonderful.

But.

To get there, my previous two books were The Road by Cormac McCarthy (supposed to be incredibly powerful and moving; I found it pointless) and Within the Shadows by Brandon Massey (puerile).

I feel like my time is too valuable to waste on crappy books, but who am I punishing by going on strike? I need a royal book tester, is what I need. I had high hopes for Goodreads.com, but their search engines are really… sub par. Every “Best Of” list has at least one Twilight book on it. Honestly, guys? And I dunno, my tastes run maybe not 90 degrees, but some discernible difference from the pack. The Historian only has 3.5 stars on Amazon, but I think it’s the best thing I’ve read in years.

Sigh. I dunno. I’m gonna try some Agatha Christie next, I think.