Good and Bad News

Hai, it's me, telerportin from the chemo place. I'm about done, I just gotta keep waking up from my annie stesia and mom can pick me up in about an hour.

The Good News is my anemia score is back up to 27. Of course, that means that my tiredness and not-eating-ness can't be blamed on anemia, since I'm barely anemic at all now.

The Bad News is that the vet said one of my kidneys felt a tiny bit more enlarged than normal. This is hard to tell, because even when I was ultrasounded and declared in remission, my kidneys were still prominent/ slightly enlarged- this was just a permanent and harmless effect of the cancer. But now one of them seems a little bigger than is considered normal for me, but only by a little. I had a kidney function test, and bloodwork, and everything was great, so the vet didn't do an ultrasound on me today. I got vincristine today, which has always worked the best on my cancer, but also is the one that has messed up my WBCs twice, so if the Cytoxan no longer works for me, then upping the Vincristine is not an option.

Hopefully my sleepiness and not eating where in part due to the chemo. The Cytoxan does last the longest with me, and I was a much sicker cat in terms of bloodwork and had several palpable tumors before I was this lethargic with the cancer before, but Mommy kinda thinks that this is the beginning of the not so fun road...

Since the cancer being back isn't definite at this point, the vet didn't want to talk to much about rescue drugs and what happens next. But mom pushed, because mom feels like if we are going down that road we should know as much as we can as soon as we can. It seems the most likely option will be to add Lomustine (CCNU) into the mix. Mom is scared of this because it damaged the marrow of a wonderful cat on the lymphoma forums and the cat had to be put down. Another option would be to get me in for treatments weekly again. Mom doesn't like that because she liked that I had a nausea-reduced week every other week, and also she is fast running out of green paper to keep doing every week treatments. But for now the plan is to just give me my vincristine, and then she is to call the vet on thursday and give an update on my status. This will determine where we go next.

Thanks for all your purrayers. They mean a lot to me and Mom and Dad, even though Mom and Dad are scared and leaky-eyed now.

Love,
Texas