A few days ago I received some heartbreaking news about our much loved family cat. She is 12 and we adopted her just under 2 years ago after her elderly owners passed away.
A few weeks ago she began drooling excessively and had a runny eye. We took her to the vets twice where they diagnosed an infected tooth root, gave her antibiotics and said to bring her back to check on it. We did that and although it had cleared up a bit, the root was still looking inflamed and there was slight drooling and still a runny eye.
The vet gave her a general anaesthetic to investigate. I was expecting she’d need the root extracted (she has poor dental health and not many teeth left anyway). What the vet phoned to say was a huge shock. The vet thinks she has a mass in her mouth that he is 95% sure it is an oral cancer. He said it had started to eat away at her upper palate. He said he could take a biopsy to check but he wanted to put her to sleep. I asked him not to and to take the biopsy. We’re waiting on the result now.
I spent all the evening crying. When I brought her home, she was her normal lovely self. Meowing for her food, snoozing in her favourite spots, purring on my lap on the sofa. She doesn’t seem in pain at all and looking at her, I can’t accept that she’s dying. The vet says she will be lucky if she lives for two weeks more.
I am devastated because I love her so much. She really is part of our family and I don’t feel ready to let her go when she seems so bright and happy. I am praying the vet was wrong but he seemed very adamant and said that he’s seen this happen in other cats and that the mass could well triple in size. Can vets diagnose mouth cancer by sight or could the biopsy show something different?
Just feel so sad. I imagined many more years with her.