Yesterday took our eldest cat Buttons to the vet, expecting to get her some antibiotics.  She’d had a persistent mild sniffle for some time, and lost some weight.  She was eating better lately, though, getting up and down on Mommy’s desk on her own, looking pretty good.

Twenty minutes later, X-rays showed her entire left lung was solid white.  They couldn’t find a diaphragm or most of her intestines.  The prevailing theory was that either her diaphragm had somehow broken, and her inner organs were crowded against the lung…or the entire white area was a cancerous mass.  The surgical choices were crack her open at the ribs, either fix the disarranged organs, or remove the entire left lung.  She could theoretically, in best-case hopes, survive maybe another year living on one lung…less active, but still alive.  Or she’d also die on the table in her weakened state.  Or she’d get through surgery and wake up in pain and difficulty during the weeks of post-op recovery.  And all on the faint promise she’d be something like our old Baby Buttons for however many weeks, months, maybe, we’d still have.

We couldn’t put her through that.  I cradled her, my wife picked her up and nuzzled her.  She was purring…Christ, even as she was struggling to use her belly muscles to wheeze each bellows-breath, she was purring and wanting to take treats from her Momma’s hand.  They took her back to give her an IV, and she swiped at them in classic Buttons defiance.

Read more »