The choice

I spent the weekend researching on the internet and coddling myself in the warm bathwater of guilt. I was five days late this month applying his Revolution; probably he'd gotten bit during these unprotected days by a flea and had contracted kitty plague. "I think my kitty has the plague!" I announced to my husband, who scoffed. The plague though: it exists. The kitty was unvaccinated through several of his first weeks as a newly outdoor cat. Probably he'd got bit by infected rodents or breathed on by sick cats and it was ALL MY FAULT.

The result of this was that I was not surprised by the vet's decision yesterday that likely this was terrible, terrible cancer in my kitty's mouth. My husband, on the other hand, who had decided it was a bee sting, felt rather more stunned.

This is not a post about feeling sad or numb or mourning, though. I am not those things right now. This is a post about feeling sort of bullied and mad. The vet, he wanted to refer the cat to a specialist, a team of specialists, dentists and vets and oncologists. They would test the kitty thoroughly and proffer a diagnosis. Here's the rub: the diagnosis alone was very likely to be $1000, and could be much more, like $1500.

This latter number is somewhat more than I make in a month, so money obviously is what they call a "concern." Plus this doesn't include treatment, or the operational cost to my nerves of forcing my poor sick cat who hates to ride long distances in the car to drive two plus hours to the specialist, have tests all day, drive home. The operational cost to my sanity. Plus, if it IS one of the unfortunately rather common malignant carcinomas, the prognosis is not that good anyway.

The vet assured me that the other option, having a re-biopsy performed here in town to confirm the suspicion of cancer and working to make the cat comfortable, was NOT a decision that made me a bad mother, that even the decision only to administer cortisone and hope was not a bad one. That the vet himself, if it were his cat, would likely opt for the re-biopsy and re-evaluation.

We have opted not to go to the specialist. We are having the second biopsy and giving the cat pain medications. I am also considering diet therapy, like making him a nice steak dinner.

But even were money no object, I would hate to take the kitty to the specialist. The car ride would stress HIM out, and thus stress ME out. The prospect of trying to help a very sick cat cling to life just to keep him from being dead depresses me. I myself am imminently depressable and probably need to go back on antidepressants. I am not working at a job that fulfills me very much right now. I can't see how taking on the project of a long and institutionalized illness, especially one with such a poor prognosis, would help anything in my world or the world in general.

I love my cat very much. It is probably the closest thing I've experienced to the love of a parent for a child, as the cat has very often been a pain in the ass with whom I've had to remain patient, and just as often has been a total joy, and this mixture of emotion and long relationship and working out the kinks of how to live together is all folded together into a beautiful complex experience. I have done all I can to ensure he has a high quality of life: premium food, necessary checkups and medication, tons of affection and playing.

Yet in spite of this feeling, if he is quite sick I don't want to struggle to keep him alive, even if the struggle affords TINY odds that he would recover. If going to the specialist resulted in ninety percent odds he'd recover, probably I'd do it, put it on the credit cards and be damned, even though just last week I wailed about how I couldn't go to therapy because I couldn't afford the $80 a month or whatever it would cost.

But I'm just not sure about the ethics of medical technology. I don't mean this to sound reactionary. I have some reservations about it for humans, too. Those spectacular rescues you hear about, where thousands of dollars are spent for a helicopter to fly in and remove a critically wounded hiker from a canyon. I think it's wonderful. But I also think it's awful: what about all the lives that could be saved or improved if the same thousands were administered as vaccines to poor children? I know this is a simplistic analogy, but I can't help hating this society, the bullying power of money. How, because we CAN, we sometimes devote disproportionate resources to a single or a few lives, but fail to allocate BASIC resources to all. I don't think I could stomach it, spending all that money on my cat when I didn't even contribute to the relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina.

My cat is a beatiful orange loaf and I love him. But I hate the way that this possiblity -- the specialists who only possibly, not probably, could save him -- makes me feel that if there are two choices, a pile of money or my cat, of the two I'd choose the money. It isn't like that.

But of the choice between a painful and medicalized and financially and emotionally draining process vs.the feeling of my sick but peaceful cat purring comfortably in the crook of my arm: yes. I would choose the second one. I will research nutrition supplements and cook concoctions and pet and coddle my kitty, will stay awake as I did last night for long hours just to stroke him gently as we all slept together on the bed with all the rain outside. Did I know a practitioner, I would totally get him some kitty acupuncture.

Knowing that others would choose the other, would say keep the cat alive at all cats and DAMN THE COSTS, continues to prick at me, to make me feel alternately angry and guilty.

Meantime the kitty has gotten up and his frisking around the window, looking at birds. I'm going to go to the vet and get some pain medication for kitty, and then perhaps I will write a novel.