Disjointed Digression

So a few months ago, Candy noticed that Queue was having a problem when he went to the bathroom. I don’t want to gross you out with details, so I’ll just refer to this as his poo problem. Candy took him to the vet. The vet said that they were not sure what his problem was, and they would like to try putting Queue on a steroid, but the vet went on to say, Queue has a heart murmur, and a steroid could cause a heart attack, if the murmur was not just due to Queue being ten years old. To make sure, the vet would need to do a sonogram. (I think I’ve mentioned that before). The vet gave us a few other options to try. First we changed his food. That had no effect on his problem. Then we tried some pills, at first we were crushing them up into soft food for him. Then we changed to another type of pill that he could taste in the soft food, so we broke out the pill shooter. Much to our surprise, the pill shooter worked very well. Queue didn’t like it, but no one got hurt. I would wrap him in a towel so just his head was poking out, hold him like a baby, and Candy would force the pill shooter into his mouth past his protesting tongue and pop the pill in. Queue would swallow it immediately.

Unfortunately the pills did not help. Candy took him back to the vet, and we decided to get the sonogram done, the vet also let us know that they would sonogram his stomach area, so they could diagnose his problem better.

Candy took him to get the sonogram done, while he was there, they found that he had fluid in his chest cavity. They extracted some of the fluid and sent it to a pathologist (I believe). Oh, and the heart murmur was not a problem, it was a “dippy septum”. (I might be getting the medical terms wrong, sorry I never took biology.)

The sonogram showed that Queue has a thickening of his intestines. Not really  a growth or mass, but a thickening. The fluid they extracted was lymph fluid. In the words of a Magic 8-Ball “Outlook not so good.” So now we had to take Queue to an internal specialist. I went with Candy to take the poor manx to this new vet. The main reason I went was because the word cancer had come up a few times in conjunction with the thickening and lymph fluid.

The new vet was very nice and took Queue to another room to extract some cells from his lymph nodes. After examining the cells, and consulting with another specialist there, the vet was 75-80% sure that Queue has lymphoma. Cancer of the lymph system. Since the lymph system is all over the body, it could pop up anywhere. It appears to have popped up in his intestines. She could not be 100% sure with out doing a biopsy on part of Queue’s intestines. Candy and I didn’t want to traumatize Queue with surgery. So we decided to treat him for cancer. The doctor gave us three choices (I might not be remembering these correctly, but here goes):

1) Chemotherapy that uses similar if not the same drugs as human chemotherapy. The drawbacks to this are cost, and having to take Queue into the vet once a week (an hour trip each way). Also Queue would be lethargic for a few days after treatment (as lethargic as a cat gets) and would just be getting back to normal when it came time for another treatment.

2) The vet told us of one drug that seemed to work as well as the chemo in this situation, and all we had to do was inject Queue once a week with a steroid (I forget the name it’s something like dexamethodrine).

3) This option was just something to treat the symptoms (at least that’s what I took from it.) It would most likely not do anything to the cancer, but would probably clear up his poo problem.

We opted for the Steroid injections. Queue has been on these for two weeks, next week we take him back to the vet for a check up, and to see where we need to go from here.

Everything I’ve read online has given a time frame of four to nine months of life from the diagnosis of lymphoma.

What is odd (and I’m not complaining in the least here) is that other than his poo problem, Queue shows no signs of being sick. No loss of appetite, no vomiting, no less energy, if anything he has actually put on a little weight. I’m sure that will change as his condition gets worse, so I’ll enjoy my time with him as much as I can.

Update: Candy and I don’t want people to have the wrong impression. After seeing the specialist we are more hopeful than hopeless. Since Queue is still acting fine, has no additional symptoms and we have started a course of treatment, we have a positive outlook on the future. The time frame we were given is just an estimate and is in no way written in stone. The Specialist even said that she has another feline patient that has been on this treatment for over 2 years now and is still healthy and has a good quality of life. So thank you all for your concern, but at this time we would much rather hear and/or read the “it is so good to hear Queue is doing well” then the “oh I am so sorrys”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.