Maceo Cat's Cancer Journey

Today was Maceo’s big day! We were SO NERVOUS leading up to the surgery, and especially in those hours of the actual operation.

Our operation got delayed by about 4 or 6 hours because the clinic had a miscommunication with the surgeon, who I guess is a rockstar surgeon and was performing a surgery in Nevada in the morning! (We live in San Francisco).

Eventually, all things came to pass and Maceo went in at about 3 pm. At 5:30 pm I started to get really, really nervous because we still hadn’t received a call saying everything went ok.

Finally, after 6, the clinic called us and said Maceo was in recovery! What a relief, but we were still scared to hear how things went.

Dr. Farese, the surgeon, called us after that and shared a bunch of technical details about the surgery. I’m not an expert, but it sounds like it went relatively well — though he did confirm that it was a very long procedure due to the size and placement of the tumor.

I was so relieved, I could barely pay attention to the details!

It was one of those crazy heat wave days in San Francisco and everything was a little out of whack. Lots of ambulance sirens throughout the city, 90 plus degrees at 9 pm. We were scheduled to give our other kitty Charlie, some doxycycline for his ongoing puffy paw issue, and then to follow it with a squirt of water to wash down the medicine.

Unfortunately, the harmless squirt of water didn’t go down the right tube. Charlie started coughing and choking, and it didn’t subside after half an hour. We decided to take him to emergency — at the same clinic — because it could cause aspiration pneumonia, and anyway we have insurance for Charlie 🙂

So, that’s how we got in a visit at 5 hours post-op! We took Charlie in and then they brought out Maceo to say hello, all hooked up to his drugs on an IV.

He was high as a kite and even tried to jump off the table. He was cutely bandaged but definitely in a loopy morphine state. Still, he recognized us and that seemed to trigger a burst of activity — too much activity! So he went back to his kennel a short few minutes later.

Here are some photos, 5 hours post-op: