This year isn’t starting off the way I imagined it would. Remember our kitty Bandha who I left out in the rain for 5 hours? Well, he has bone cancer in his jaw and has a huge tumor that apparently is very aggressive.

Around the beginning of Dec we started noticing him sticking his tongue out of his mouth all the time. While we found it cute, we started to realize it wasn’t normal. Especially because he was drooling a lot too. So I brought him to the vet. She couldn’t get a good look in there, but gave a pretty definite diagnosis that it was a tumor. We decided against the super expensive biopsy and all that entails because we decided that we wouldn’t treat him anyway. They would have to remove his jaw and then do chemo and really, what kind of quality of life would that be for any of us?

So she gave him an antibiotic shot that lasted 2 weeks in hopes of it just being an infection. 2 weeks later, no change- and it seemed to have gotten worse. We decided to bring him to another vet for a second opinion. This vet said it was definitely cancer in his jaw bone and that it is pretty aggressive. She also gave antibiotics for an infection that had developed in there as well as pain meds.

So now I have been giving him his pain meds which seems to be helping, but he’s not eating much and basically that is when they told us it was time to consider putting him down. So it may be time to say goodbye to our little Bandha.

I have mentally prepared myself for this inevitability. Right after Silas died, when my cats were the only comfort I had, I had to go there. I know as a pet owner that they won’t be there for as long as you want them, that is reality. But Bandha is only 11 and I didn’t think it was his time yet.

I hate to watch him suffer. I think that is the hardest part of all of it. He can’t tell me what he wants or how he feels and I don’t know how to help him. We’ve been giving him all the love we can,  as much as he allows.

People keep asking how our other cat Chumby is handling it. She usually gets annoyed with him being near her and hisses and swats at him. Now, she is just completely ignoring him like he isn’t even here. It’s really strange. She’s still giving me loads of love though, maybe even extra, knowing how sad we are about Bandha.

As far as eating goes- he won’t eat his cat food or the high calorie food the vet gave me (which is driving me nuts – all the open cans that neither of my kitties want to eat- argh!) and instead, will eat only goat cheese! I guess he knows that if his end is near, he may as well go out with a really yummy meal.