Trigger warning: Pet death due to cancer
Oof. Last week was… kind of terrible, to be honest.
Not all of it. The visit to the dentist to get the mold for the crown done went well. Made my tooth look a bit like a shark tooth before putting the temporary on. The Flower Moon Spring Market was fun and Isaac even finished his new dice game.
Not so great… turns out Isaac’s new used car has a coolant intrusion.
And worse, we found out last Friday that Baby Girl Neelix (aka BG Neelix) had cancer.
A few days later, she passed away in the wee hours of Monday morning.
About a week and a half before her vet appointment, she hadn’t been playing quite as much or eating quite as much, but she was still active and attentive, and she’d often gotten colds, so it didn’t seem too concerning until she stopped coming out to greet us when we got home, and then it was really concerning on Thursday when she wouldn’t touch her food (except whipped cream and a little oat milk since I was trying to get her to eat something).
On Friday morning I called the vet as soon as they opened, and got her in that morning due to someone having a cancellation (almost didn’t get that, but a bunch of dogs started barking, and no one could hear anything, and when the person on the other end of the line was able to hear me again, someone had apparently just made a cancellation.)
Took the kitty in, and she tested negative for FIV and feline leukemia, so we thought maybe it was a different but treatable virus causing her issues and the abnormal amount of fluid in her abdomen. But, to be certain, we had extra tests run.
And that’s how we found out she had a tumor in her abdomen, with a lot of unfortunate signs pointing toward a lymphoma.
We put her on antibiotics and a steroid in hopes she might start feeling better, and scheduled a follow-up appointment for the next week. But the medicine didn’t take, and she didn’t give us the chance to have exploratory tests done to see if the tumor could be removed.
What she did do, however, was give me extra cuddles. Between bouts of hiding in the closet, if I put her on the bed, she let me cuddle her for longer than usual. An hour, hour and a half, two… We both fell asleep. A couple times I heard her purr.
I really, really appreciate that she gave me that extra time. That’s been helping a lot with the grieving, I think.
Looking back, it helps knowing we were able to give her what we think was a good life. Thanks to Isaac deciding to claim her as our next kitty after Skynyrd (she ended up becoming my kitty), she got a chance to have surgery on her leg when it popped out of the joint, and if you’ve heard any of my tales of her going places she definitely shouldn’t have been, you wouldn’t have known she’d almost had her leg amputated.
She was smart, too, and when chasing her little dangling chick toy, she would run through the second door of the bedroom in order to meet me halfway in ambush.
Her method of waking me up in the morning when she wanted fed or groomed was to hop on the bed… then off the bed… then on the bed… then off the bed… until I finally straggled out from under the covers.
And she’d come running the moment she heard me turn on the water kettle because she knew that meant I was making coffee, and I put whipped cream in my coffee, and that meant I’d let her have the little bit of whipped cream I wiped off the tip of the can.
So I think she was a happy kitty, and got all that happy kittiness condensed into what was a little less than a year with us. But I’m glad for the time she spent here. I wish she could have had longer with us. I had thought, had expected, I would have gotten to spoil her for years to come. (She was only a few years old… her having cancer was not on my list of expectations).
But I’m glad for the time I had with her.
I love you, Baby Girl Neelix. I miss you.
Anyway, have a dollop of whipped cream in honor of BG Neelix, my adorable orange gremlin.
Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist 