More Cat And People News

I tried to post an ad for a shirt that says "Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris" on fb and was denied. It depicted a tabby cat in Rosie the Riveter regalia and pose.

 We have a Slack channel for cat people at work. Several of my favorite cats were affected by the layoffs that concluded yesterday. It's been so deeply sad. Half of my girl band was laid off -- people who I never thought would leave unless they wanted to. One of the company's biggest cheerleaders, who is like the beating heart of the factory, also left. It's the end of an era in a certain way. Everybody feels it. Yet our current forklift is our most popular model yet.


Amidst all of this crud the boy cat's doctor prescribed Orbax, which worked on his sinus infection previously, and he is officially bouncing back. Two days ago I was thinking dire thoughts about how he could barely breathe through his tiny nose, and today he is running around (literally) smelling things. It's obvious that he can breathe better. He's trying to bite his papa's chin, and he started trying to chew my hair. I'll take it! Such a relief.


This is the week of testing. I was not worried going into the PET scan, because I can tell that mrguy feels better. He's still hella weak, but no more coughing (some of his lymph nodes that were affected were behind his lungs, and that might have been the culprit). This week we had a PET/CT (mid-skull through mid-thigh) on Wednesday, he had a CT (abdomen to mid-thigh on Friday. Today we take the long drive for labs prior to having chemo on Monday, supposedly. The results of the PET are already in, and I feel optimistic. There are good words, like "resolved" for some of the things that had been cancerous. The brain blood clots seem better? Basically what you don't want to read is that there is uptake in a certain area, because that means there is cancer.
This is esophageal cancer, so that's the primary location. But in his case it's not a single tumor -- his version of EC is diffuse, and it had traveled pretty far away by the time we found it. That’s why it is considered Stage IV. And that will continue to be his stage, even if some day he is found to be NED (No Evidence of Disease). 

New news hot off the press is that the lymph nodes in his neck now seem clear. His esophagus still looks funky but "The previously identified uptake within the distal esophagus is not seen today". That sounds pretty good. And this: "Compared to the prior exam, there has been interval resolution of the previously identified hypermetabolic activity within the distal esophagus, mediastinal and right hilar lymph nodes as well as retroperitoneal lymph nodes. Today, no worrisome FDG avid lesions are identified." That would seem to indicate that there aren't tumors. But he didn't really have tumors, so we'll see what the doctor says when we talk to him on Monday.

My aggressively laid-back husband says "Let's leave it to the experts", and so we will.