My poor Patches

Patches is my cat. One of my cats. I adopted her from Spay and Save back in May of 2000. She is the sweetest-tempered little thing, just full of love. I noticed a couple weeks ago that she seemed to have some lumps under her skin near her armpits (leg-pits?).....I don't pick her up that often, neither of my cats are the type that like to be carried around. They love sitting on my lap, or laying in bed with me, but don't like being picked up, so I hardly ever pick them up. Now I feel so guilty for not knowing for sure how long these things were there....I took her to the vet and they did an x-ray of her chest...she has kitty breast cancer. I guess on cats it's the mammary gland, but I hate that word...mammary. Mammmmmmmarrryy. Mam-ry.

yech.

Anyway, she's scheduled for an operation on Monday to take out the lumps (fortunately the x-ray showed that it's not invaded into her lungs or anything). The doctor seemed optimistic that they can cut it all out and she'll be fine.

One thing she said is that since I don't know for sure how old she was when I got her (spay and save said probably about a year old), she may have gotten spayed when older than a year old, and apparently you should spay your cats as young as you can. If you wait until they are older, they are WAY more likely to get this cancer. My poor little girl.

I am SO worried..... :-( I hope I'm doing the right thing and not making her go through something for nothing. About 274 years ago I worked at a vet for 5 minutes and it killed me when you would see these poor animals suffering, but people wouldn't put them down because they loved them....but really they were being selfish. I know that sounds mean, but I don't mean it mean. I haven't seen any changes in her behavior so I'm hoping that means she isn't in pain from these things, and her appetite seems fine. She does seem to sleep more than she used to, which of course, for a cat, means she's sleeping 26 out of the 24 hours in a day. Why aren't I a cat?

Oh, that's right, because then I'd have mammammmmary glands. ew.

Keep your fingers crossed for my girl on Monday, if all goes well, I'll have her home with me again on Tuesday.



more animals