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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9801548" data-attributes="member: 177">Thanks, all, for your thoughts.  Several of you have shared your own stories, and be sure, at this moment, I can sympathize and empathize with all of you.I'll likely to use this thread to jot down some bits over this time.  Nobody's obligated to check in - I'll be doing it mostly for myself.Nothing morbid about it.  Grief is complicated.My wife has to handle folks asking that question every day.  If the owner waits until is is blatantly clear that it is time, that means maybe they waited too long.  But if it isn't blatantly clear, they're left with the question if they did it too early.  There's no way to know if you hit perfection.But it is part of the responsibility we take on when we get pets.  They can't manage their discomfort on their own, and they need us to help.  All we can do is the best we can for them.  The hard part is doing what it best for them, and not what feels best for us.Psychologically, they can take on places in our emotions just like family members.  And part of the problem of love is that it means you can, and occasionally will, feel loss as well.Yeah.  We are trying our best to make sure she gets some more of those.  Today, one of my jobs is to hunt down a few things for the house that should help her enjoy her favorite things and places a bit more - like a set of stairs to make it easy for her to get to to one of her favorite snoozing spots.Yep.  To quote Spider Robinson's book, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: "Shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased."  The act of laying things out can help one process.[spoiler="The medical stuff"]The biopsy came back, and she doesn't have "the good kind" of cancer.  To summarize: with basic palliative measures, she's probably got one to three months.  With chemotherapy, it is like one to ten months.  The first step, though, are basic palliative meds - anti-nausea and appetite stimulants.  This all will be over quickly if we can't get her to eat.  I've been tracking food intake over the past few days, and yesterday, there was a slight uptick, but still not enough to sustain quality of life. Next will be steroids.  The compounding pharmacy that can make what we need was closed for the weekend, but I should hopefully be able to pick them up today.  We are going with transdermal formulations of everything we can.  Cats typically hate oral meds, because they all taste sooo bad.  And poking her with that many needles would be traumatic.  But transdermal meds are absorbed through the skin - so you can just wipe them like, inside her ear.  She actually seems to like the contact, so that's a win.  Steroids can slow the advance of cancer a bit, and help her feel better in many ways - while they may interfere with some forms of chemotherapy, without them, she may not make it until we can get her into the next possible step.  Then, as soon as we can finagle a consult with an oncologist, we will discuss chemotherapy.  Chemo for animals isn't like it is for humans, because the goals are typically different.  In humans the goal is generally to blow the cancer back into remission, and we are terribly aggressive in pursuit of it, and poison the patient to just short of dying, hoping that they are tougher than the cancer.  In animals, the goal is improving quality of life, and we don't count misery of chemo as much different from misery of cancer.  So, we won't poison her until her hair falls out, or the like.But chemo may force us into some hard choices.  Many of those are chemicals you can't administer at home, even if you are my wife.  So, we may have to weigh how often she has to go to clinics (which is a miserable experience) against how much time we can buy her. [/spoiler]Let's talk support structures.I have the great benefit that my workplace allows us to take sick days not just when we are sick, but to support others - if someone has to spend a day running around getting meds and going to doctors, that's okay.The people around us have been wonderful.  We were at some hazard of basically sitting at home staring at the walls wallowing in the situation.  But one pair of friends came by Saturday night to have pizza and watch Babylon 5 ("Sic Transit Vir" and "Late Delivery from Avalon", two great episodes, just happened to be up next).  Another couple came by Sunday for a cooperative board game (Legends of Sleepy Hollow).  So, in both cases, we got a chance to not over-focus, which is actually better for processing the whole thing.Our next door neighbor, as part of her weekly grocery shopping, also put together supper plates for us, so last night we didn't have to cook. We have plans to have people over for various RPGs on Tuesday and Thursday.  Grief has a tendency to make folks fold in, but we're doing what we can to stay engaged with the world.And then a bit on grief.I find I am a mixture of very sad and kind of angry, which isn't surprising.  The sadness just kind of sits there whenever I'm not really engaged with something else - which is also not surprising.  Sadness and grief has physiological elements to them, much like depression, so they kind of carry with you all day, regardless of what you are doing.  Some forms of distraction can help alleviate that for a while, which is why social contact while processing such things is important.Normally, I'm pretty solid in equanimity.  If someone in my family needs something, I get it done.  There are moments that are really hard, though, when nobody really needs anything.  Like yesterday, I went grocery shopping, and I stopped in the pet aisle to pick up some cat treats, because, well anything that will get some calories into her is probably a good thing right now.  And I'm standing there, holding these stupid bags of treats, feeling hopeless, and trying like heck to not cry in public.  Not that I actually care what random people in the market think - if they want to think weird stuff about a big middle-aged Viking looking dude crying over cat food, that's their issue.  But having folks I don't know try to engage in that moment would have not helped me in the slightest.</blockquote>

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