October 6, 2022
The week leading up to the Long Beach Marathon was stressful as all fuck.
Here's the abbreviated version.
We were in Wisconsin for a wedding the previous weekend. Flew back to Los Angeles Wednesday. Spirit Airlines did us dirty last month, so we thought we'd try Frontier instead. They're a fucking nightmare. We ended up having to pay an extra hundred bucks to get my god damned bag on the god damned plane. That's a whole saga on its own.
Also wednesday, Amanda met with her new oncologist to discuss the results of her Syriana scan. Getting that scan done was, again, its own long, arduous tale. This is only the second time she's seen this oncologist, but he's easily the best of the three that she's had over her entire cancer journey. It's a good thing we've kept her away from the internet the last couple weeks, because if she had seen the imaging of that scan before being able to talk to the doctor, she would have flipped out. The rib lesion that we were worried about, the whole reason the scan was ordered, now seems to be nothing of consequence; however, one of the spine lesions now appears to be our primary issue. Worst of all, traces of cancer cells were found in some lymph nodes. The doctor doesn't think they're a big deal, though; he thinks we're still seeing progress, and we're going to keep on the current treatment plan for now.
She sees her radiation oncologist, who she loves, when we get back from Long Beach next week. We'll see what she has to say about the scan results then.
I'd love to circle back and write out a full entry for each of those two events, individually, because this is a cliffs notes version.
After the appointment, we went over to Alyssa's for a bit to talk about the results and read through the actual report together. Alyssa's apartment building was having fire alarm maintenance, and the klaxons had been screaming throughout the building for the previous two hours. Alyssa had duct taped a pillow over the one in her apartment. She still had to finish her laundry to pack for the trip, so she still wanted us to come to her rather than going someplace less noisy.
We could already hear the alarms blaring by the time we reached the Dunkin Donuts on her corner.
So we spent the rest of Thursday running around doing our errands and checking off the boxes on our to do list. Car wash. Prep the animals to go to Alyssa's, where a friend of hers would be taking care of them. Pack clothes, electronics, running gear, and more for the trip.
And we were running very late on all of this. It was dark outside by the time i went to walk the dogs. Amanda usually walks with us, but she decided to stay back because she had to use the bathroom, and she wanted to keep rolling on the packing. She was coming out of the bathroom and reaching for a shirt to try on when she noticed something odd.
Fifteen minutes later, i came back into the RV. "I need you to help me look in D's mouth," she said.
Now, our cat D's mouth is a terrible place to try doing anything. D's jaw has been broken for years; i could go into the long chain of medical diagnoses and procedures she's had over her life to explain why, but that's an entire story unto itself. The lore is really piling up here. The point is, it won't heal, but it doesn't cause her daily pain unless a force acts upon it, and she still has a good quality of life. But, as such, any attempt to hold her mouth open is usually painful for her and she thwarts it as quickly as she can.
Through the use of a flashlight, video recording, and exploiting her dislike of being held, we managed to shoot a clip of her open-mouth crying, and got a good look inside. Amanda's fears were confirmed.
D has an enormous mass growing inside her cheek.
I had seen blood drops on the floor the night before, and assumed they had come from D, but thought they had come from the other end. She's got a history of urinary tract infections, especially over the last year or two, which we keep treating and then she just keeps getting reinfected. No vet has been able to discover the root cause. She literally just finished a treatment cycle within the last two weeks, right before we flew back to Wisconsin for the wedding.
But now, we're sure that blood came from the mass in her mouth. And now, it would be preferable to have a recurrent UTI.
We are confident it wasn't there two weeks ago; hell, Alyssa is pretty sure she didn't see it at all while we were gone. Which means the mass appeared and swelled to the size of a gumball within the last couple days. It can't be ignored. Amanda says 90% of cats that develop a mass like this, especially in such a short time span, turn out to have squamous cell carcinoma, an aggressive, advanced cancer. It's probably already metastasized elsewhere in her body. We had been suspicious that D's UTIs could be caused by urethral or bladder cancer, but the tests keep coming back negative or inconclusive. This might be related to that.
Amanda had a full-on meltdown. She said she feels like she's failed as a pet mom, and especially as a vet pet mom. I had to comfort her and calm her down, and remind her that D has always been a project cat, we've always known she had a lot of issues, and if Amanda had not taken in this damaged kitten, she would have been dead within six months. She's 13 years old. Amanda's diligence and patience with this cat, as irritated as she gets with D sometimes, has already afforded her more than a dozen years she wouldn't have gotten otherwise. She's not a failure.
As we were in the middle of that crisis, our friend Nat in Wisconsin sent a message to our group chat. Sending love, something something. Amanda saw that much of it on her smart watch and blurted out, "Does Nat have ESP?"
I PM'd Nat right away and asked her, "Do you have ESP," and sort of explained the situation. She said she was just wondering about the results of the scan, but professed that she does have a connection to our hearts from across the country. We ended up having a video call for over an hour, in which Amanda vented about the cat, about her own cancer, about the slapdash travel prep, and when Amanda took a call from Alyssa about D, i had the opportunity to fill Nat in on the Frontier fuckery. At the end, Amanda felt a lot better, and we could continue.
I talked Amanda through other possibilities. She thought it could be something related to D's stomatitis. Plausible, D has been dealing with that her whole life. We also tossed about the possibility that it's just a cyst that's filling with fluid or pus. Other ideas were floated. With a cat like D, having these personal factors, i posited that her odds of it being an aggressive cancer were probably a lot less than 90%, simply because conditions are right for the other things to become highly likely.
Meanwhile, Alyssa forwarded the pictures we sent her to Dr. Minneo, whom she used to work with at ACCESS here in the valley and who now works in, coincidentally enough, Long Beach. We've taken D to see Minneo in Long Beach twice before, so this isn't fully out of the blue. Minneo apparently had the same "What the fuck???" reaction.
So this threw a big wrench in the Friday plans. Amanda's parents, her brother David, and our nephew Jack were all flying in to watch the marathon, David to run it, and they needed to be picked up at the airport at 10 am. Not LAX, though, unfortunately; at Ontario. The same airport we had just gone through for that Frontier shit. It's about two hours east. Meanwhile, D needed to be in Long Beach as early as possible; Minneo was planning to leave work around 1-2pm, and the clinic opens at 8am. It's a 1-2 hour drive to Long Beach from Northridge.
After careful consideration of car logistics, we finally agreed that Amanda would take Alyssa's car, with its increased carrying capacity, to Ontario to pick up her family while Alyssa and i took the cat to the vet. The collected Haerterichs would then meet us in Long Beach, and we would spend the afternoon chilling in the hotel's luxurious hot tub.
By 12:30 am, packing still incomplete, we decided that Amanda and i would sleep at Alyssa's place to help facilitate the early morning start. We had the car mostly packed. I was waiting on Amanda's phone to finish dumping her storage, since it was almost full and we want to be able to shoot videos on the run. It became very clear that we wouldn't be able to transport the cats at the same time as the dogs, since the car was already so full, so i took Amanda to Alyssa's and dropped her off, heading back to collect the cats and hoping that the data dump would be done by the time i got there.
I ended up sitting at home for over an hour waiting on that dump.
I didn't get to sleep until 2:30am. When i did, Alyssa was still working on her own stuff.
When i got up to pee in the middle of the night, i found her passed out on the floor in the living room, face down, lights still on.
---
LBM2022 NAVIGATION
Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | The Following Monday
No comments:
Post a Comment