The Brad Hole

After we got Ian back from surgery last Thursday, he had about a day of normal behavior, aside from an inability to use his mouth. Beyond that, things declined fairly steadily. We were unable to feed him via eyedroppers - we tried but more got on us and him than down his throat. By Sunday, he was hiding under the bed, completely listless and it was clearly too stressful for him to try. Alongside this, the surgery to remove the tumor under his tongue caused the bulk to die off and it fell out on Monday morning. Up until that point, I had hopes that once his tongue/mouth recovered, he'd be able to feed and drink by himself and he would recover his strength. It was devastating when that happened.

We had made an appointment to take him back in on Monday afternoon to see about getting him to eat and drink again, but this was before he lost his tongue. As the vet told us, Ian's biopsy came back and he had an advanced and aggressive form of cancer: feline squamous cell carcinoma. The vet gave him days to weeks to live given the aggressive growth and spread of the cancer. The mortality rate for this particular kind is unfortunately very high. He warned us that the the most likely outcome is that Ian will either slowly starve to death or the cancer will start to cause him great pain in fairly short order. He encouraged us to put him under at that moment if we were ready.

I can't say I was caught off guard; when his tongue fell out I pretty much knew his time was limited. Still, we had the vet inject subcutaneous fluids to keep him nourished at least temporarily. The shot-in-the-dark goal was that it might be enough to get him back up and about, and maybe he'd find a way to feed/drink on his own and we'd buy a few more weeks. Last night we was indeed back to his old self, but completely unable to drink or feed. He'd just sit staring at the water dish and food bowls, nosing both and smacking his mouth. His mouth is filling almost non-stop with mucus and that, combined with the lack of tongue, has him completely confused. We tried a few different tacks - cleaning his mouth, having him drink from a running faucet, but only met with frustration. The best he could do was stick his mouth under the faucet for a split-second - not enough to take a meaningful drink, but enough to cause us moments of hope and anticipation.

The current thinking is that we'll wait until he's lost the energy from the subcutaneous shot yesterday and we'll take him in when he starts to deteriorate again. It doesn't look like that'll be today, but the vet said we've only bought him 1-3 days tops. In retrospect, I think that's why the vet suggested we think about euthanizing him yesterday when we were in. Waiting for him to start to deteriorate again is hard, painful work and even if we can get him fed, we're just keeping him alive to die of cancer in short order.

Regardless, I'm glad we had a "good" night last night, and not only was Ian able to be his old self, but we were able to give him all the attention and care he wanted - which was a lot. :)