Well, the days just fly by! Maceo is now two weeks and three days post-op, and could not be doing better.

He is so much happier without his tumor; it really doesn’t seem to matter if he has the arm or not. He clearly doesn’t feel “disabled” in any way, as evidenced by his territorial chasing of our neighbor’s cat (luckily for the neighbor cat, Maceo was on a leash at the time!!), professional-grade eating, and various jumps and runs throughout the house.

He is a happy, purry guy and has not been on any pain meds since he got his staples out on Tuesday 9/12/17. He had been tapering the meds sharply before that,  and we even forgot to administer them on two occasions. Didn’t seem to affect him at all.

He’s now a free cat! Well, still on his mushroom protocol, but he’s more or less used to that by now.

His fur is showing some early signs of growth, but the area still looks pretty bare right now. We’ve let him run free, even though he’s so adorable with the tripawd t-shirts!

We are SO SO happy we opted for the route of treatment. He is happy and enjoying great quality of life. That’s what counts!

The surgeon even confirmed that he believes (and the lab tests show) that he got “margins,” albeit in some places only a few millimeters around the tumor (rather than the customary 5 cm!).

So, we are happy as can be and have been able to relax for the first time in 6+ weeks (since the cancer was discovered).

Definitely keeping up with the supplements, however.

Here are some pictures of our strong guy!

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: