Hey everyone – I suppose I have some explaining to do as I kind of ghosted the blog for a little bit.
A little over a month ago Calypso started limping (honestly I can’t tell you exactly when simply because the time has blurred and everything is a mess in my mind). Now since she’s a very active cat and also getting up there in age we figured she either pulled something or her arthritis was acting up. I already had her yearly vet appointment scheduled so decided I would bring it up then if it hadn’t resolved (at this point her vet appt was only about a week away). We ended up taking her to the ER vet a few days before her appointment simply to get her some pain relief and make sure it wasn’t anything else. The ER vet believed we were right and gave us some pain meds to give her relief. Her primary vet also believed it to be a minor injury when we saw them.
Less than a week later we just felt she wasn’t improving at all and was obviously in a lot of pain, we went back to the ER vet as it was the weekend and requested x-rays. What they found…was not good. There was a tumor on her tibia and since I’d mentioned offhand that she had an occasional cough, they also did a chest x-ray – and discovered what looked like a mass on her lungs as well.
I’m not going to go into the full details of the rest of the story, but we did seek out an oncology consult (even though the closest oncology vet was 3.5 hours away) to find out if it was treatable and what our options were.
It’s not treatable. More was found during the CT scan and tissues were taken as a result of it since they had time and we gave the ok. Calypso has an aggressive lung carcinoma that has metastasized to her leg and also affected her lymph nodes and spleen.
There were no signs, no warnings. She had a cough that until recently was super infrequent and had been brought up to the vet more than once (upon viewing videos it was believed that it was allergies or GERD because of the way it presented). The only other indicator was when she started limping and by then it was already too late.
We don’t know how long she has. I’m understandably not in a great place and my reading has definitely suffered. Right now we’re keeping her as comfortable as we can with pain meds and letting her tell us how she feels. Though she’s not moving around a whole lot thanks to the pain in her leg, she’s still eating, drinking, alert and giving us sass. As long as she’s doing all that, we’ll do what we can.
Please give me some grace as I get back into the swing of things. I’ve had Calypso since she was 8 weeks old. Almost 13 years ago she climbed up to my shoulder and chose me and has been by my side ever since.
I’ll be back into the swing of things shortly, but I wanted to explain what has been going on, especially since Calypso has always been a part of my content too. I’ll likely post more regular updates on her health on my instagram but will make sure to share here with any major updates as well.
The Wandering Wordsmith 