Sir Percival, My Little Prince

Life, as always, continues. It’s 9:55 am on a Tuesday, and World of Warcraft is in the midst of an update so I can’t mindlessly fly around collecting herbs and mining ores. I’m home because the duplex’s pipes were meant to be refitted yesterday and today, but the company pushed back the dates to later this week and my wonderful landlady didn’t let us know until I asked why they didn’t show up yesterday morning. It’s not a total loss, though, as I’ve been enjoying the four-day weekend I’ve given myself, plus I’ve got HVAC repair scheduled for today and I will (hopefully) have working AC for the first time this summer by the end of the day. It’s been a whole big protracted thing, and the story of the fickle nature of the HVAC goes back a couple of years. I’m hesitant to be excited about having AC for the last of the warm weather and to have heat for our very mild Californian winters, since I’ve been feeling pretty consistently screwed over and let down all summer, but I remain cautiously optimistic.

An update on a previous post: Percy is well. It’s wild to think that just two or three months ago, I was a blubbering mess daily and nightly over his health. He dropped another pound in the time it took us to nail down a potential diagnosis, so he ultimately got down to six pounds when he was typically at about nine. After the ultrasound and other lab work, the vet narrowed it down to either small cell intestinal lymphoma or inflammatory bowel disease. Dr. Brown said small cell intestinal lymphoma is the kind of cancer she would prefer to have if given the choice, which helped with my sense of doom and despair regarding Percy’s longevity. Both IBD and lymphoma are treated similarly, with steroids, with the potential to add on chemotherapeutics if he doesn’t show improvement. I was given the choice to treat or take biopsies to narrow it down.

Endoscopic biopsies are less invasive, but may not yield as much information as taking an actual full-thickness sample of the intestine surgically, and there’s always the chance that the biopsies would still be inconclusive. There’s a lot of stuff out there about whether IBD and intestinal lymphoma are related or part of the same disease process, and I have enough experience with working in diagnostic settings to know that not every sample you take from an animal is going to tell you 100% for a fact what the problem is. I hate to say it, but money and anxiety played a role in the decision-making. I’m still hurting financially after Dante’s whole emergency saga at the beginning of the year. Dr. Brown assured me that Percy was not in immediate crisis, but when I thought through the timeline of scheduling surgery (probably a couple of weeks out at least) and waiting for Percy to be healed up before beginning treatment (about 2 weeks), I felt like I just couldn’t wait. Because of some other findings on his ultrasound, we also would have had to schedule a test for liver function beforehand to ensure he could even have the surgery. Percy was already so thin, barely eating, and not acting like himself. I was so worried that if we waited another month, or even more, he would be skin and bones.

So, I decided to go straight to treatment, and I’m so grateful and relieved to say it’s been going great. In the last two months or so, he’s gotten back up to about eight pounds. All his labs have been great (except for consistently low phosphorous), and he’s packing on weight and acting like himself again. I was initially fighting with the idea that I don’t do well with ambiguity and that not knowing the exact disease process would regularly haunt me. A lot of that was motivated by trying to pinpoint his exact life expectancy so I could mentally prepare, and that was fruitless regardless. Information online is all over the place, which I suppose is to be expected, but the vet assured me that she has seen cats live normal decently long lives with both IBD and intestinal lymphoma.

I’ve always struggled with letting go of the stress and anxiety that comes with wanting to control all the things in life that are simply out of my control. I think it’s a relatively universal experience, or at least common enough to make me feel less bad for being this way. Much of my sorrow over Percy being sick came from a place of feeling paralyzed by the need to make the exact correct choice for him, despite there being multiple paths that were all perfectly logical and acceptable. Losing Dante at just under seven years old and so unexpectedly to what was effectively a giant medical anomaly made me feel, very irrationally, like this was not supposed to happen. Percy can’t be sick, he shouldn’t be sick, he has to live to be old and decrepit with me without problems because the universe already did me dirty with Dante. I expected to have both of these boys well into my 40s, and that didn’t exactly pan out. Percy and Dante, as a pair, were so vital to me through so many of life’s ups and downs. I added a third cat and a dog to the mix over time, but Percy and Dante were the first two non-rodent animals I’d ever had as an adult. Not that my rats mean any less to me, but they don’t exactly live long. There were so many days where I was too listless and depressed to get out of bed, but knowing they needed me to step up for them was what kept me going until I got a better handle on my mental health.

This is all to say that losing Dante was a soul-crushing experience, and something inside me broke when I realized Percy was sick. Now, though, he’s doing better. We’ll continue to monitor him and adjust his steroid dosage to the smallest therapeutic amount we can. He’d be pissed if he realized our nightly wrestling match to get him to swallow his pill is going to be an ongoing part of his life, but I’ll take it. I’m so incredibly grateful that he’s gaining back weight, he’s perkier, and he’s back to being feisty and chaotic. Seeing Percy return to his usual antics made me feel like I was getting my cat back, and I’m just so relieved that we have been able to return to something adjacent to normal.

My job is entirely based on the deaths of animals. I know how unexpectedly and suddenly young, healthy animals can take a turn for the worse. Nothing is guaranteed, and all you can do is your best to provide your animals with the love and care they need. Despite knowing this, and preaching these thoughts to upset clients who fear they have done a disservice to their animals, it’s always been difficult for me to actualize these thoughts for myself. But as much as I’m not enthused about having a chronically ill pet, it’s been a much-needed lesson in learning to let go.

I’ll enjoy the good times, I’ll persevere through the bad, and I won’t get too upset when Percy claws at my hands for attention because I know that someday I’ll look at the scars and miss this wild little guy, my precious Sir Percival, my little prince.