(no subject)
This weekend I found a lump on Mackerel's left haunch, traditional site of the Feline Leukemia vaccine, which can in rare cases cause cancer. All weekend I stayed far far away from the internet, so as not to read any terrible stories about feline vaccine sarcomas. This morning Mackerel and I came into the hospital and while procedures and appointments swirled around us under the suddely hot overhead lights, I placed a catheter and injected a premed. I set up surgery, I checked and rechecked the monitoring equipment, the anesthesia machine. Even for his neuter Mackerel only received a healthy sedative, from which he emerged, bonking his head against the front of his carrier, some 20 minutes later. Perhaps this first surgical procedure was the one in which he received the vaccine that may or may not have provoked a clot of rigid cancer cells over his hip. If he has cancer, we'll hastily amputate the leg before it metastasizes. Mackerel took a long time to go down, and after we intubated him I began to clip. I was weirdly proud to strip away the under layer of downy white and find scarred, pocked skin. My cat--plucked from some alley by some animal control officer some years ago--is an incorrigible little fighter. The growth, which Dr. L removed with all of the right attitudes (precision, care, a kind of zen rage), was not the squishy ovoid slug you see when removing lipomas. Lipomas, for the record, are quite rare in cats. It was a constellation, a solid mass of irregular rays stretching away from the center. Dr. L felt around the inside of the incision with her gloved hands, made two, three laps to make sure she excised the entire mass, left no angry margins. Later, at home, Mackerel swayed and groaned, fought against the residual effects of telazol and isoflurane. Though it took him several hours and a few shaky tries, he is finally up on the windowsill, singing plaintively to me while I move laundry in and out of washers and dryers across the apartment building's flagstone courtyard. Even marred by a bald square of angry flesh, wrought with purple frankenstein stitches, he is handsome and delicate in the window. I pick up the hamper and pause for a minute, try to imagine what he'll look like without a back leg. For a life, a leg is a small price to pay. The test results come back in 5 days.
