This post is brought to you by the letter whiskey.

Posted by: Heidi Cullinan on: June 30, 2011

In: Cats
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I’ve run out of witty ways to spin this stuff. So forgive me if this is a bit raw.

The facts, for those not on twitter or facebook:

Bingley doesn’t have asthma. Looked like it, but it’s lung cancer.
Cancer has gone everywhere. EVERY fucking where. It’s all over his skin. Little bumps everywhere. I knew they were there but were hoping there was some other explanation. Nope. All cancerous.
He has fluid on his lungs and I think in a few other places. May or may not be able to drain it.
This cancer sprang up in a month. He will not be here long. Next week is looking like a long time for him.
This is fantastically not fair.

Part of me has been going here ever since he started coughing before our trip. Part of me knew when he started hiding. Hope died when this morning my options were “cancer or heart failure,” but it’s cancer. Third one in a year.

Yes, we’re considering environmental factors, but not with much zeal. Mia’s was injection site, which is a fluke thing and has nothing to do with environment and all to do with bad luck. Blair’s was rare and not attributable to any environmental cause. Bingley’s could be from radon, but that’s it. Our vet is following up with Public Health, but it’s all just in case. What this is, it’s almost certain, is just really fucking crap luck.

I am sad, yes. Very. I tend to waffle from numb to despondent and then coast into this quiet place where I don’t want to be talked to. And where I really wish I’d have picked up that bottle of Jameson’s I eyeballed at Target, because I only had one shot in the bottle, goddamn it.

He’s home. He’s lying around a lot. We have pain killer, which seems to have perked him up a bit, but after last night and now comprehending why he was so sick, I’m getting ready mentally to walk into a room at any time and find him dead.

He is still himself, which is the only thing keeping me from vowing to take him in to be put down tomorrow. He purrs when he sees me. He likes to be petted and shows me his belly. So I pet him. But it’s hard. He feels like a cancer cat, and he has for awhile, which I’d been trying not to think about. He’s dropped a ton of weight. Just five months ago I was chasing him out of Blair’s high calorie food because he was getting too fat. Now he weighs just 11 pounds. You can fell all his bones.

It’s hard because he’s the sweetest cat ever. Never a problem. Easy as hell to pill. Purrs loud enough to hear across the room. And, honestly? It’s hard because it’s the third fucking one diagnosed in 18 months, will be the third dead in the past six months. I am tired of this. I was spent after the second one. I feel like I just got done running the 15k marathon through hell with my bowels torn open, and with the stitches just barely healed I’m told there’s another 7k to go that wasn’t on the schedule. I’m pissed. At nothing, because there’s nothing to blame. It just happened. It just sucks. I just have to go through it, again.

Usually when I write a blog post I try to frame it around empowerment for myself. Ownership. Enlightenment. I try to find the Zen in there somewhere. Not today. Today i have nothing. No Zen, nothing even close. Not even a venting pissed-off rant. I just have me, tired and sad and sick of this shit.

Cancer, I really wish you had a physical, conscious manifestation. I wish you were a cold-hearted demon or a corporate asshole or a sniveling weasel living under a bridge. Because then I would so very fucking hunt you down and kill you slowly and painfully over and over and over again, or I would die trying. But you fucking whore, you won’t even give me that, will you. You just take my babies over and over and over, and you don’t even have a soul to notice what you did. So I’ll just do this shit again because there’s nothing else to do.

But someday, fucker, I’m putting all this pain in a book. And there I am so very going to win.