Mystery illness, Possibly Lymphoma, Not Eating

[Mac and Cats]

I am not a genius when it comes to looking at medical documents. From reading his ultrasound, if it were my cat, the only thing I would find concerning are the nodules, but I don't really know what that means? Are those concerning or typical of an older cat? I'm not sure why she would jump to he should be euthanized based on these results. I hope he is feeling better or will start to feel better over the weekend. I know you've tried a million and one things with him, but wondering if you have tried these Tiki Cat calorie supplements? You can get them in a smaller package of 20 at Petco. They also have an elder version now, which are 35 calories each. The baby ones are 25 calories each. They are very, very small portions. I can usually get my cat to eat a full one when he is feeling rough. My cat prefers the baby ones. They are NOT a complete food, but it may help to get calories in him. My cat also has possible IBD/SCL and I know how much of a struggle it is to get them to eat sometimes. Please keep us updated and let us know how he is doing. We are sending good vibes and thoughts your way.

 

[RussellsMom]

My friends, Danno died today.

We rushed him to the ER because he had a severely high respiratory rate all morning (I didn't measure exactly, but I estimate it was over 100 breaths per minute). We held off a while because of the great ultrasound report we'd gotten and because the vet told us to expect to see improvements from the Elspar in 2-3 days. We thought maybe the tachypnea was a side effect of the new chemo and it would ease up. But around 11, he also started gasping, sometimes with a faint meow, then panting with his mouth open. His eyes and ears were responding to our movements and words, but he was completely unable to move his body and head.

At the ER they were unable to save him. They brought him to us, still alive, but in terrible distress, gasping for air. His pupils wouldn't dilate despite the brightness of the room and his third eyelids were mostly closed. My brother kissed and cried for him so much and said how sorry he was and how much he loved him. My brother didn't want to stay to the end, which I understood. I stayed with Danno for a very long time before I had the nerve to call the vet in. I told him how much I love him, how everyone loves him, what a precious treasure he is, what a wonderful friend. I kissed and held him when he died.

The ER vet also believed that there was CNS involvement of the lymphoma and that it had begun to affect his ability to breathe. The fact that for the past two days he wouldn't even move his mouth when I put water or food on his lips also seemed to indicate that it had affected his brain's ability to know what to do with food and water. Since the abdominal ultrasound wouldn't show what's going on in the central nervous system, it's possible that the chemo was genuinely helping the GI lymphoma, but not so much the CNS lymphoma. We'll never fully know what happened. But I read through my thread before posting this, and these past two days of sudden, extreme downturn sounded like worse versions of the original illness that beset him a month ago. I had forgotten how extremely lethargic, emaciated, weak and wobbly he had been that first week, when I was begging my brother to take him to the vet in the first place. So it seems reasonable to think that he had lymphoma in his central nervous system then, too, but that the chemo and pred had temporarily made him feel so much better, especially in his abdomen, where it did seem to be resolving. Until just two days ago, I was nervous for him, but I felt optimistic about his recovery because of those great first two weeks and the general upward trend. He went from being on death's door to being quite lively and kittenish, his usual sweet self. But the symptoms that struck like a hammer blow two days ago were probably just the original illness finally catching up with the initial gains of the chemo.

I have had many cats in my life, but my brother's cat Danno was the sweetest, most affectionate cat I've ever known - even outrageously so - he loved to hug and kiss people. He was gentle and innocent and tremendously loved. I'm shattered. It was my honor to try to care for him.

Thank you all so much for your help and your incredibly kind words and thoughts. I don't think I would have been able to bear the trials of this month without you.

 

[Mac and Cats]

Oh I am so very sorry. You did a wonderful thing by tying your hardest to care for him. I am so sorry that you all have lost this special friend. Thank you for doing your best for him. I'm thinking of you and know how terribly awful this feels to go through. I will give all of my kitties a kiss and a hug this evening in Danno's memory.

 

[iPappy]

RussellsMom I am so saddened by this news. I was so hoping that things would improve. It's such a terrible feeling knowing there are things we can't protect them from.
Based on what I've read here in this thread, you didn't just "try" to care for Danno. You did. You were a nurse, and a friend to him. When we face something that no one can fix, we do the best we can, and I firmly believe you did that and so much more. Very rarely do I hear of someone who is not a vet yet does daily "in home visits"! Danno, and his people, were and are very lucky to have you. My prayers and condolences are with you all.

 

[DeesCats]

I'm so sorry RussellsMom for your loss of Danno and the great effort you did to try and help him. Please accept my condolences.

 

[fionasmom]

I am so sorry to read this. You did so much more for him than anyone else would have done in attempting to treat his illness, and then running the gauntlet with your brother in order to be his advocate, and his champion. Danno absolutely understood that you were there for him and that you were the one he was able to rely on the most for love and support.

 

[RussellsMom]

Thank you all so much - your condolences are so kind and mean so much to me. The last two days were such an unexpected shock. My heart is broken.

 

[AbbysMom]

I'm so sorry for your loss.

 

[RussellsMom]

I’m writing again because I don’t want Danno’s thread to become inactive. It’s not even three full days since he’s been gone. From the day he fell ill a month ago, I’ve had a very steep learning curve about feline lymphoma and a host of other conditions, medications and treatments, and the past few days I’ve continued reading, desperately seeking answers to what happened to Danno.

It gives me a small amount of comfort to keep investigating. I’m not ready to let my care for him go, and researching makes me feel like I’m still being active on his behalf, as though somehow I could still help him get better.

When Danno died the other day and I kept researching, I thought at first I was doing it just for selfish and magical thinking reasons: it makes me feel a little better to be “doing something” (no matter how ineffectual for Danno himself) and it makes me feel like somehow I can bring him back (“I can still get to the bottom of this illness!”).

But this morning a better thought came to me: I come onto this forum to get help from others’ experiences when I’m facing something scary with my cats, and so will others come onto this forum and hopefully find useful information and shared experiences when they type certain words into the search bar and come across Danno’s thread. Thanks to all of you, we looked into all sorts of conditions, medications, and possibilities throughout the month that Danno was ill, so there’s a lot of information that might be helpful to others who are in the same painful situation of wondering about similar symptoms and then dealing with a diagnosis of large-cell lymphoma. Maybe reading about the progression of Danno’s illness will help others find a diagnosis and therefore a treatment sooner than we did.

When Danno suddenly went from totally normal, active, playful, no sign of anything wrong to terribly weak, withdrawn, and not eating literally overnight, I asked my brother if I could see all his routine vet records. Being a TCS member, I have a bulging file of my cat’s records, but like most normal people, my brother didn’t have any records. I asked him to have his vet send all 7 years of records (Danno was ~12 this year, but my brother moved to this area 7 years ago—I don’t know who his vet was before that).

To my brother’s credit, he did take Danno in regularly for his vaccines, for nail trims, and also to look into Danno’s lifelong itchy, gunky ears and recurring skin lesions (itchy patches on his stomach, flanks, and above his eyes). One thing that haunts me from reading Danno’s records is that for the whole 7 years, they’d made notes about “Owner says Danno vomits every day or every other day after eating. Owner says he thinks it’s because he eats too fast”; “Advised Owner to begin food allergy trial”; “Advised special diet”; “Suspected IBD”; “Advised Owner to do full blood panel and ultrasound”; “Owner not concerned about vomiting.” The vets had made the connection all along between the ear and skin inflammation and the regular vomiting, and had all along suspected IBD.

I didn’t know anything about these records until last month. All these years before this final illness, whenever my brother had wondered out loud about Danno’s ears, skin, and vomiting, I always said “I guarantee you it’s probably food allergies or IBD. It’s very common in cats.” I brought him special foods and a year or two ago I even outlined a food trial schedule for him. But he never tried it. He never did a blood test or ultrasound for Danno as the vets recommended. He never looked into allergies or IBD.

I don’t know if Danno had IBD or food sensitivities or whatever, but what haunts me is that if it had been investigated sooner—potentially even years ago, when the vets started advising it—then they might have found whatever it was that killed him at an early enough stage that it could have been treated successfully.

So one plea I have is to be observant and to follow up regularly with healthcare. In fact, we’ve been putting off having one of Russell’s persistent burn-scar scabs looked at because “he has them all the time”, “they’ve never been a problem before”, etc. But now we’re taking him to a dermatological specialist instead of just his regular vet, because we’ve been so frightened by what happened to Danno.

By the way, I would never say any of this to my brother. My grief at the moment is profound, but my brother’s is shocking and my heart is absolutely broken for him. I do not ever want him to doubt that he did what he could to help Danno during his illness—and he did try very hard to help him. Like all of you, my bond with my cats is indescribable to those who don’t have those feelings. But I’ve never witnessed a bond like the one my brother and Danno had. When Richard would walk in the door, Danno would jump into his arms and lick his face and kiss and cuddle with him like that, deeply purring, all day. They were inseparable, devoted, joyful companions for 12 years.

The issues that I’ve described with my brother in this thread have never been about his love for Danno. They were about lack of knowledge about cat health, passivity, and to a lesser extent (though it was a major obstacle to me in my efforts to help), about my brother’s resistance to my “preachiness”. We’re in our 50s and I’ve gotten used to and made some peace with that dynamic over the years, but in this case it infuriated me, not for my sake, but because I felt it got in the way of Danno’s care. I get absolutely no satisfaction from being more informed about cat health than my brother. I just wanted Danno to get better. It didn’t matter what vehicle was used to get him better. My anger wasn’t about “Why doesn’t my brother listen to me?” but “Why doesn’t my brother set his pride aside, just for now, for his cat?”

That’s another plea, for a rather subtle aspect of caring for our cats, which is to take care of ourselves. Unresolved, unhelpful interpersonal relationships and patterns of behavior can be an impediment to our cats receiving the best or soonest treatment possible. I have my own issues, as you’ve seen, with trusting vets and fearing drugs, so I’m not throwing any stones. But there is a time to set your issues aside, and that is to make sure that your loved ones are receiving the best care they can.

This is already a long post, and is mostly about cat carer habits than about lymphoma specifically. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to post on this thread from time to time about some of the things I’ve learned or thought about what happened to Danno. There isn’t nearly as much literature about LCL as there is about SCL and other conditions, and I’d like to keep a conversation going about LCL in the hope that it helps others learn about this terrible disease and hopefully prevent it from taking their cats so quickly, as it did with my brother’s lovely Danno.

 

[iPappy]

It's very selfless of you to share Danno's story here, because as other members have said, they hope what they and their cats went through will help others and maybe, some day, there will be a cure-all for things like feline lymphoma.
On the vomiting records: It's a common misconception (VERY common, as a matter of fact) that cats vomiting often is "normal". I remember growing up, we had this huge overweight cat that threw up often. It was considered "normal" for cats back then, and like your brother, it was assumed he ate too fast. I never saw his vet records, but I suspect he had something going on that no one ever caught.
Your plea for others to follow up on vet care is a very good one. I lost a Papillon dog to a very strange, baffling cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. The symptoms at first were mild and mimicked hot spots, or allergies, and progressed to mimicking auto immune conditions. By the time we realized we were dealing with cancer, the treatment plan became more narrow and we had to scramble as his condition worsened early in 2022.
As for your brother, and his bond with Danno, I don't doubt for one moment that he did share a tremendous bond with that absolutely adorable, sweet cat. Based on my experiences with my Papillon, while he did get vet care (every 2-3 weeks for over a year, and then 2-3 times a week for treatments), a part of me just plain refused to believe what I saw happening in front of my eyes. He did achieve a brief partial remission in the summer of 2022, which made me so happy! But when that remission began waning and he worsened rapidly more than before, I absolutely refused to believe it. A week or two before he passed, I ordered him some new things for "when he went into remission again." It did not happen.
Just based on my own knowledge of what you've said through this thread, I wonder if there was a tiny part of your brother that decided he just could not deal with the reality that was facing him with Danno's condition. It's pretty common, even in human medicine when dealing with a sick family member, from what I understand. A diagnosis like that is scary and sometimes our only real way of dealing with it is to pretend it's not happening, and everything is "fine". This goes along with your plea to let caretakers know that self care is SO important. When my dog was sick, I spent a lot of time frantically looking for some treatment, or some supportive anything that would help. While I did find things that I feel helped, I did neglect my own well being. I have been there many times, until the reality slaps me in the face. It's very difficult to accept. And when we neglect our own well being, it can become more and more difficult to provide them the best care we can.

 

[FeralHearts]

RussellsMom I am so sorry for you loss. It's heartbreaking. As someone who lost a beloved kitty to cancer - LCL - (it will be 7 months on the 19th of Feb) - I know exactly what you mean when you say about the literature. It's beyond heartbreaking. My vet actually pulled up a bunch of research she had on treatment and outcomes, none of it good. I think she was trying to help me accept things and reconcile my heart with her condition. iPappy sometimes it really is hard to believe what's happening.
XOXOXO to you all.

 

[silent meowlook]

Hi. I am sorry for your loss of such a wonderful cat.
Cancer is unpredictable and can be aggressive. I have seen cats with one type of cancer go into remission on chemo, only to have a different type of cancer show up on another organ. Sometimes no matter what you do, you don’t get much time.

While it is always good to treat early, in Danno’s case, I doubt it would have made a difference, sadly.

There is a common misconception, even with dome veterinarians that cats just vomit hairballs. That isn’t true. A cat with a healthy GI tract, can process and manage any hair consumed.

I do understand about continuing to research in the hopes of figuring this all out. Unfortunately it usually doesn’t happen. But, knowledge is power and it is always good to learn.

I am very sorry for your entire family. I also have a brother that doesn’t listen and I know how frustrating it is to want to slap someone, yet also protect them from life’s devastating lessons. It all hurts.

 

[mani]

RussellsMom the team at TCS are so very sorry for your loss; Danno was blessed to have you in his life. It has been a journey and we truly appreciate you sharing it with us.

We always lock a thread when a cat has passed, out of respect.
If you would like to leave a tribute to your boy, please do, in our Crossing the Bridge forum.

Our deepest sympathies.

.RIP Danno
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