Yesterday I discovered estrogen positive but progesterone negative cancers have a slightly worse outcome than those in which the tumor is progesterone positive. So what's the statistic, in the big, long-range metastudy that came to this conclusion? That negative number? It's that only 97.3% of the Stage I progesterone positive achieved disease-free survival. I'm not even Stage IB, you know, I'm Stage IA, so probably my chances are even better than that 97.3%. Unless.... UNLESS!!...it's all lies. MAYBE IT'S ALL LIES.
Anyway, despite all that overall I'm doing okay. The real problem is that Banana has come to the end of the road with his epilepsy, and this weekend we are going to have to put him down, and the anxiety and sadness this is creating in me is spilling over into other things I normally wouldn't think up to be bummed about. Right now he's on three times the therapeutic dose of Keppra for his weight and twice the Zonisamide, and the seizures are still coming, and increasing in frequency.
Our wonderful, wonderful vet told me last week she would support us 110% in whatever we decided, and when he had another seizure yesterday and I called her, she said, "Molly, this is the right thing to do." She said he is the toughest case of feline epilepsy she's ever treated, and she believes he would have died at some point in the past year without our efforts in trying to keep him stable.
He has been the best of cats. Life isn't fair.
1 comment:
Hey Molly - It's Anne Rich (formally Thomas) your fellow band member from St. Joe. One of my specialties is psycho-oncology and I used to have a clinic at the Huntsman Cancer Institute when we lived in Salt Lake City. Now I just see patients in a private clinic. A large portion of my patients have/had breast cancer and all of them are still living. Even the bad cases - inflammatory breast cancer. We are just so good at treating it. So believe the statistics if you can.
On the other hand, what you are going through is something I see all the time. Totally normal and that anxiety will get better with time and distance from the cancer. I think the hardest transition is often not only the diagnosis of cancer, but the finishing of cancer treatment. You are used to seeing a physician or health care provider at least once a week to then going to nothing but check ups every few weeks to months. It's a hard transition.
I hope this helps! I really enjoy your blog. so sorry about Banana. I adore our cat, Pumpkin, and understand how hard it is to make that decision to say good-bye.
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