Help Harpo Continue Bringing Joy

Harpo is at Dove Lewis which is a non-profit hospital. They treat injured wildlife and strays, and operate on a sliding scale. If we raise more funds than he actually needs, we will make a donation to the Velvet Fund which helps other low-income people whose pets are not as famous as Harpo, but no less loved.

Here's the original estimate, which does not include the fine needle aspirations they later told me they wanted to do. But people sent us enough money via PayPal yesterday to cover those.

Harpo had been doing great, eating well, gaining weight, bringing me things again. The swings of the poop pendulum had gotten shorter and slower, requiring less and less intervention to keep them where we wanted them, on the softer side of normal. He had not needed any laxative or motility medication in almost two weeks, and rarely vomited anymore.

But then we tried a medication to help with his muscle wasting, and the diarrhea began again, and wouldn't stop after we discontinued it. He lost all that he gained and then some. I started blending his food as fine as baby food so he could eat more to stay ahead of it, but he continued to lose weight even while eating 8-10 cans a day. He would just poop it right out an hour later, then meow for more food. His liquid diet has been so messy that Groucho and Gummitch have to wash his face for him. I was really worried this might be it

Since he was hospitalized in late August for having poop stuck in his ascending colon, he's had two checkups with his oncologist, who put him on a low dose of chlorambucil for the first time in over five years. His cancer has been so well-controlled that he did not continue with chemo beyond the first course, even though it's usually life long. It seemed likely that there was something going on other than the cancer, given that his ordeal began RIGHT after the diet change, and began to improve RIGHT after I gave him his old food back.

We had an appointment with an internal medicine specialist at Dove Lewis 10/9. Since their diagnostics require anesthesia, I had him admitted late on 10/7, so they could do everything they could to make that safer. For he was so depleted from the diarrhea that he was starting to get wobbly. He got his electrolytes replenished and received a blood transfusion, and immediately began charming the staff. For while Harpo obviously does not LIKE being in the hospital, it doesn't scare him. He understands they're trying to help him, and accepts the indignities he is subjected to with good grace.

The doctor said that while his labs don't show anything catastrophic, there were some red flags that they wanted to investigate by doing fine needle aspiration of his liver and pancreas. The main thing was the endoscopy and biopsy so they can figure out exactly what type of cells are causing his IBD, neutrophils, eosinophils, etc. Then they can figure out how to treat it.

If this was just part of an inevitable decline that Harpo could not recover from, I would be making different care decisions. He's the fourth of my cats to develop cancer. I sold my own eggs to pay for treatment for my first one, who I stole when I was 17, from someone who was going to euthanize him for behavioral problems they caused by declawing him. So I know when to make that terrible call.

But for now, all indications are that we're at the beginning of Harpo's final chapter rather than its end, and that there's no reason that he can't happily do the job he loves so much, bringing joy to people around the world, a while longer. His appetite and spirit remain undiminished.