Thank you Kathy, and everyone else who has written. I have been offline for a few days, in bed with grief mostly.
It actually was hard to medicate Simon and give him fluids and syringe feed him sometimes, and he did try to get away from me. That is why I stopped doing it the first time I thought he was dying. When he felt ok, it wasn't so bad, but when he felt bad he hated it and took a while to forgive me each time. I tried to limit how often I did it. I just wish this last time I had limited it more as well, in terms of vet visits, etc. I know that I must sound insane to you with all this self-blame, but I also know that many of you must have felt this as well. I am the queen of "what-ifs." What if I had kept him on steroid shots instead of going back to pred pills. Would that have prevented an auto-immune reaction? What if I had kept him on CCNU instead of letting the oncologist try Adriamycin? What if, instead of taking him to the vet, I had done what I did the last time and just given him the same amount of steroids and held him close until he either died or recovered? These are not answerable questions, but they swirl around me at all times. And the biggest one: What if I had noticed his jaundice and his decreased appetite when it started, rather than when he was neon yellow (I did not even notice it then but just took him in because he did not want his baby food!)? Most cats on the feline lymphoma list serve do not have it in their bone marrow, which he did, and which is Stage V. The day I brought him to the local vet, his hematocrit was normal. That was a friday. By the time he saw the oncologist on Monday it was 17. The lymphoma clearly spread into his bone marrow over those few days, and if I had brought him in earlier it might never have done so. I was not paying much attention to him or spending much time with him or the others because my dog Nubi had just died of cancer. I did then what I am doing to my other animals now-- stayed in bed, did only the minimal care, did not pay much attention. If I could be better in my grief about the others I probably would have caught that he was eating less and was turning yellow. I remember thinking that there was more wet food left than usual, but I thought all four of them were eating less because I had run out of their favorites, so I did not think anything of it until I saw him not finish his morning baby food two days in a row. I was not staying to watch them eat. I am just so incapable of doing anything in grief, and I was grieving then too. And I think that influenced the way things went with him. Anyway, thanks for listening. His absence in the house is so strong. There was never a moment, in the last month when he was in the main part of the house with me, that I did not know where he was or what he was doing. He made it known at all times, and was the center of all attention. I have this image of the first time I fed him sour cream in bed. I had bought it the night before to see if he would eat it because he was eating very little, weeks ago, and he loved it. The next morning he came to cuddle in bed as always, and was laying on his back with his legs in air, snuggled in the blankets. I was rubbing his belly and he had his eyes squeezed tight and was purring. I went and got sour cream and fed it to him off my fingers in bed, and he stayed like that, on his back and purring, while eating the sour cream an getting it all over his face. At that moment he was so blissed out, and so thought he had won the lottery, so i try to think of him like that. It became a routine after that that after morning cuddles I would get his sour cream and feed him some and then we would get up. In the last week, he stopped wanting it, or eating anything in the morning, which I guess I should have known was a sign of something. But he was crazy energetic an eating and night and actually gaining weight, so I did not know what to think. Sorry for going on and on. Thanks for all your support, Michelle In a message dated 2/7/05 10:53:11 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << I know these things because you never said it was hard to medicate him, that he would run from you whenever you approached him, or that he was indifferent to you. >>
