price of a life
cw: pet illness and death
when my cat Nuggs passed away 2 years ago, it was as awful of an experience as you might imagine, but the cancer was also kind of expected because he was always the most frail of my 4 cats. the weeks leading up to his death he clearly already had one foot in the grave, and i regret very much that i kept him with me out of selfishness even though he was ready to go.
now Quiggs has cancer too. i'm a lot more mentally resilient this time, but it hurts in completely different ways because quiggs is still perfectly energetic, perfect appetite, still running up and down the stairs and being annoying. but his CT scans showed that his entire right nostril is blocked from the tumor, leading all the way up to his skull. the vet won't give us an estimate of his time left. but he is still acting like everything's fine. Nuggs was ready to go for probably months, but Quiggs is still so, so alive, except for the fucking tumor in his nose and traveling towards his brain.
his primary caretaker and me agree that we won't try radiation therapy. for some reason there are no clinics in Washington that does this, and we would have to take him all the way to Oregon. i don't know the exact cost but it's probably around 8k. his parent has not bought insurance for him and we are both unemployed at this time. it's not not an option. but it wouldn't make sense. even if the radiation kills his cancer cells, it would still damage the healthy ones enough that his quality of life would suffer.
i wish i didn't have to try to reason if the price is worth his life. i shouldn't have to. isn't one life priceless? (cues mastercard TV commercials). shouldn't i try for any chance at recovery, no matter the cost?
Ghost and Wheatley, my sons that actually live with me, are also dealing with their own medical problems right now. Wheatley has a very bad limp in one leg that hasn't improved for almost a month. his xray showed a small anomaly at the elbow that could be cancer but probably isn't; regardless, he definitely has arthritis there. Ghost has "resorption", which is this silly thing where the his gums decide that his tooth is a foreign object and absorbs it, and there's no way to stop it except extracting the teeth.
I'm very, very lucky that I am financially stable enough to afford the medical procedures for Ghost and Wheatley. I hope Quiggs doesn't resent me for not doing the same for him.
quiggs teaming up with wheatley and ghost to crush me to death, circa 2021