Cat with mast cell cancer

[DutchOmainapeartree]

Our darling Jim (12 1/2) has been diagnosed with this disease which the vet says is very rare. It is a large tumour in his intestine and we have opted not to have any treatment as this would be very distressing for him and would not necessarily prolong his life.
Anybody any experience with this?

It is pretty rare in cats yes - presumably the vet has done a biopsy to arrive at this diagnosis? The most definative answer as to whether treatment is likely to be of any benefit could be given by a specialist veterinary oncologist if you wanted to find out the absolute ins and outs of everything and make your final choice based upon that. I am not sure in cats how useful steroid treatment may be, but certainly in dogs I have seen with mast cell tumours that are beyond operable, they have all had some benefit by taking steroids for a while - helps keep the quality of life more reasonable. It may be worth asking your vet to find out more about that perhaps if not already done and discussed. Dogs more usually have skin mast cell tumours however and without looking into it more I'm not certain that steroids would be right or wrong for this type in a cat.

Sorry to hear he is so poorly though.

Thank you Beatifulgirls. No, steroids were not discussed at all, I might ask the vet about that.
Yes she did a biopsy and blood tests, they had him in for a night. I think the first thing they found was a high white blood cell count and the first thing they thought of was a lymphoma. ( I hope I get all these terms right, I'm very much an amateur in it).
The the results came back from the lab and it took our vet a day to come back with the result that very little is known about this type of cancer in cats.

The thing is that Jim is Very Bad at taking tablets and that I don't want to make his last days a misery.
We don't have motorised transport so he would have to be transported on the back of my bike, so in the end we decided that it would be best to let nature take its course with no interference until it became so bad for him that it would be kinder to put him to sleep. We have however had two previous cats which died naturally at a very ripe old age, so I very much hope we can do that for Jim as well.

Thanks once again for your message.

IF steroids are a potential help then the vet should have access to an injection called depomedrone-v that can be given once a month. That can avoid the need for tablets. Depending how you feel about it and how the vet feels you could be taught to administer it yourself so that could avoid the need to have monthly trips to the surgery for the cat. You could always try to persuade the vet just to dispense you one loaded syringe a month rather than a bottle of it if they are uncomfortable with you having a whole bottle available at home. At least then it is only you not the cat who needs to go to the surgery that frequently then.

Good luck