Jill's Journey

One year ago this month, I brought Jill to the vet for an “infection” on her toe.  Everything seemed to turn upside down, topsy turvy real fast from there.  While we’ve been on our tripawd journey for almost 6 months, it’s been almost a year (celebration to come in a few weeks) that we’ve been on our Osteosarcoma journey.  To tell you the truth, I was so lost when I got the diagnosis, that I’m writing this post in the hopes that ONE DAY, it will help someone.  I know I have helped a few kitty tripawd pawrents, but one day, I hope someone who is in need of feline osteosarcoma information, even more specifically Giant Cell Osteosarcoma information, will find some hope here.

It is not a pleasant thing when a pathology report comes back and all the vets say to you, “we’ve never seen this before”, so now, one year later, I’ve chosen to change that school of thinking, and just call Jill “One of a Kind.”  She is, of course, one of a kind in many other wonderful ways, but this just adds to her unique wonderful kittiness.  When I was thinking about writing this blog post, I went to google some studies, to see what kind of information I could show, besides just saying: “OSA is rare in cats”, so to give you an example, in one study done in 2007  of the “Diagnosis and Clinical Outcome Associated with Surgically Amputated Digits” (85 cats in the study) the following was stated (GCTB = Giant Tumor of the Bone, what Jill has):

“Of note, were the 2 GCTBs diagnosed in this study. This is a rarely reported neoplasm in domestic animals, and few reports exist in cats.  The relative frequency of its diagnosis in the digits in this study was unexpected, as GCTB has never previously been reported in the digits of cats and is uncommon in humans. Only 13 cases of GCTB were seen in the hand in a retrospective study of 50 years of submissions at the Mayo Clinic.  Typically, this tumor is reported to occur primarily in the epiphysis of tubular long bones in humans and animals, and reported cases in cats originated in the femur, ulna, rib, and tibia.”  As I said.  One of a Kind.

So, when your pet is One of a Kind, you’re faced with many challenges.  The hardest being that sometimes you’re given many treatment options and the vets leave the decisions up to you with no data at all to back it up.  I was presented with this:

“We could only find 2 cats ever to have Giant Cell OSA and they were both in Germany and no follow-up information was done on them, so we do not know what treatment they were given.”  OK…..so what do I do?  Well, I was told, “we can do chemo or just keep an eye on her since she got good margins, but we really can’t make a good recommendation as to which is better, you have to decide what you’ll be able to live with”

Hmph.  From here, I decide to keep an eye on her.  Then 6 months later, she got the met in her leg.  Do I have regrets?  Mostly, no.  There are some days where I question my decision, but I can’t go back, so what’s the use in looking back.

Now I find myself one year later with more decisions being left up to me.  Metronomic chemotherapy, as far as they can tell, has not been given/studied in cats with OSA.  Since we know Jill’s cancer is a bit more aggressive than others, we want to give it a shot.  But her bone marrow seems to be having a hard time recovering from the IV chemo, so do we give her a type that is easier on the bone marrow?  Who knows?  No one…..

It’s a frustrating thing this One of a Kind business.  But it’s what makes my Jill who she is.  She doesn’t know about her diagnosis.  She’s never questioned my decisions about her treatment.  She hops around day after day living her wonderful, happy life.

Did I choose the right chemo?  Who the heck knows?  Should I have done chemo last June?  Who the heck knows?  Should we have amputated her leg last June?  Beats me!

One thing I do know the answers to is this: Will all my googling cure her?  No.  But I do have the hope that ONE DAY, be it 5, 10, or 50 years from now, someone will google “Giant Cell Osteosarcoma Feline” and my blog will pop up first, and my One of a Kind cat will help someoone out and give them some hope.

And now, because you can’t have a blog post without a picture, here is my One of  a Kind: