‘She was a bit naughty,’ the vet said. ‘We had to sedate her.’ A vision of Grumpy entering a phone booth and emerging as a feline Edward Scissorhands, crossed my mind. I didn’t mention that it recently took two vets and two vet nurses to trim a single claw before passing our pocket rocket of trouble back to us.
I refer to Grumpy as our Monday model, assembled by workers still dreaming of the weekend, using machinery that hadn’t properly warmed up. She came to us as a nervy kitten and grew up to be as jumpy an adult, distrustful of being picked up and god forbid anyone should go within cooee of her paws. Some years ago she made several attempts on the life of our our younger cat, Loudmouth, a Wednesday model with the sweetest nature. This prompted multiple interventions, including putting Grumpy on a course of kitty Prozac. Things did come good and it’s been heart-warming to see the two of them behave like a normal cat couple, even if Loudmouth knows never to take food from the bowl first.
Shortly before Easter, a golf-ball-sized swelling in Grumpy’s neck was diagnosed as malignant. We were given the option of bombing our 16-year-old girl with cortisone or going down the path of chemotherapy, the prognoses for each being inversely proportionate to their costs. I should mention that we don’t have pet insurance.
Given her age and temperament, we decided to try the cortisone approach. After a week, the good news was that the golf ball had become a marble. The bad were the all-night stentorian breathing and blood-laced sneezing. I started inquiring about in-home euthanasia services, the least we could do being to give her a proper send off. Then I had a rethink.
As we enter week six of six months’ worth of cat chemo at Sydney University’s oncology vet practice, several things have emerged. Remission can take as little as three weeks to achieve. Our sleep patterns have returned to normal. Loudmouth is unaware of what happens when her sidekick disappears every Wednesday but is only too delighted to have her back. Each week we’re reminded that Grumpy needs to put on weight, a failure to achieve that has struck through the heart of my Jewish-mother gene. Much to M’s disapproval, I’ve taken to following Grumpy around the house with bowls of food, placing pan-fried liver and other non-solid temptations wherever she is – the sofa or our bed – and periodically monitoring for changes in levels.
While treatment is costing us an arm and a leg, there have been positives. There’s a view that animals tolerate chemo better than humans because they’re incapable of overthinking things. Certainly, Grumpy has better quality of life compared to a few weeks ago, and she submits – not exactly willingly but without too much operatic accompaniment – to being transported across the Bridge to have strange people and objects enter her space. She’s still on daily cortisone as well as some new medications administered at home. Just don’t ask us to mess with her paws.