Linus has a lump...

For those of you who don't know, Mike and I have two Siamese cats. We started with Linus, who someone had left behind at the apartment complexes that Kate had been working at the summer Mike and I got married. Mike hadn't enjoyed cats up to that point, in fact enjoy is a little soft, he didn't really like cats at all. And Linus won him over. Linus lets Mike pile driver him and body slam him, Linus lets him hold him on his back in the shape of a bean. Linus hides in our suitcase when we try to pack to go on trips. He grunts a little when he has to jump too high or pretty much whenever he jumps down from anything. He really enjoys marshmallows. And he really likes to be vacuumed.

When we lived in our house in Duluth, he'd have these random spurts of energy where he'd start in the basement, come bounding up the steep basement steps, slip and slide like a cartoon character across the wood floor thru the kitchen, into the living room, where he'd then lead the first five steps, grapple up the rest of the steps, race around upstairs before he'd finally be satiated. This is especially funny when you've realized the normal pace of anything for Linus is less than slow.

One afternoon, again when we were in our house in Duluth, we had left for a quick trip to the grocery store, or something, had come back within an hour, and as we pulled up the driveway, there was Linus hanging, head first, out of the kitchen window. We hadn't remembered that we had left that window, the only screen-less one in the house, open. Our other cat, Sally had escaped first and went to hide under a bush, and Linus had thought this was a good idea, but changed his mind just a little too late. There he hung, his entire body out the window, with just his two back feet clinging to the window sill, until we came and grabbed him.

So a few weeks ago, we noticed Linus had a bit of a lump on the right side of his head, about the size of a grape. We were a little nervous, but not too worried, and because Linus becomes Dr. Jekyll when we take him to the vet, we decided to wait a little bit and see what happened. It, of course grew quite large fairly fast. Mike took Linus in to just have the vet look at him. Linus wouldn't even let the nice man close enough to have a good look. The vet offered to put him under, give him a proper exam, and then biopsy the now ping-pong-sized mass on the side of his head, just under his ear.

We accepted this offer, made Linus fast for 12 hours, he was a very unhappy kitty, to say the least, and took him in again. As I walked into the office with the growling and spitting cat carrier, the receptionist recognized our little angel by sound alone. I received the all-okay call a couple of hours later, went back to pick him up, was informed that he was a little crabby and would be groggy for a while, but he came thru pretty well. The unfortunate news was that the vet had not seen anything like this before and would like to send some of the collected cells away; we'd know a bit more in a week.

And if any of you have ever seen a cat waking up from anesthesia, it's quite possibly the most sad and pathetic thing I've ever encountered. You can tell that he doesn't know what's going on, why his legs aren't working properly, why he can't avoid running into anything within four feet of the direction he would like to go. And he would just lay there with his eyes wide open, head down to the side, and just lay. I had to check a few times to make sure he was still breathing.

Anyways, this long tirade ends with this: Linus has a lump. It's origin is unknown, it's mostly squamous cells, they cannot tell if it will invade the bone in his head and jaw, but it is unlikely to metastasize. The vet assumes it has come from a salivary gland, and when I asked him what he would do if Linus were his cat, he sighed, said he hated when people asked this, and said we wouldn't operate on it. Linus is old in cat years, not elderly, but old. He may not recover, the vet might not be able to get all of it, and right now he has pretty good life satisfaction.

But now I feel a little like we are in kitty hospice, looking for signs that he might not be doing well. Is he going off by himself because he knows it's time, or just because he wants to look out the window. (The vet said that we all will probably reach the point when we will just sit and look out the window, that this isn't necessarily a bad thing...) Is he still eating, is he sleeping more than his typical 18 hours a day, does he chew his food or just swallow it, and is that because in typical Linus manner he generally wolfs his food, or is it because he has a tumor that has grown into his jaw and he can no longer use his jaw to chew?

For now, Linus sits on my lap, still loving to sit in the most irritating positions (between you and the keyboard, on top of what ever book you are reading, on top of whatever project you are working on, especially bad when beading, etc.) so that you are ensured to pet him, and we type this little story, he and I, about the life still to be lived, just one with a few more golf ball-sized lumps along the way.