ICU Bill For Her Infernal Majesty Samus the Cat

Our elderly cat, Samus, is dying. We had her admitted to a pet hospital in Brooklyn late Tuesday night after her appetite took a nose dive, expecting the chronic kidney disease she was diagnosed with last year had progressed. What the bloodwork turned up was severe anemia and BUN (blood urea, ie the toxins your kidneys usually clear and excrete in urine) levels that were "extraordinary high". Ultrasounds revealed enlarged kidneys and a mass in her stomach. Biopsies confirmed what all the other evidence was darkly hinting at: renal lymphoma. An initial round of chemo and a blood transfusion did little to get her numbers up, although according to the doctors she's feeling a bit better since undergoing the latter.

At this point the kindest option seems to be to bring her home tomorrow and try to keep her comfortable for a week until the 30th, at which point an at-home veterinarian will come by and end our friend's life. The vets at the pet hospital have pushed for more chemo to see if it improves her numbers, but the astronomical figures in pet chemotherapy treatments aside, she is 17 years old. In human terms, she is an 87-year old woman with terminal cancer. More chemo might buy her three to six months, but nobody can tell us what those three to six months might look like, quality-wise. The last year of her life has been mostly spent sleeping by the radiator and giving our younger cat merry hissing hell when she does deign to stroll about the grounds; I can't see it getting much better than that, but I can see it becoming much, much worse, and I'd like for her to go out while she's even remotely ahead.

That gets us to the big practical issue at hand, which is the cost of all these tests and transfusions and chemo and 'round the clock ICU care for five days straight. Initially we were quoted 8k, which was a huge scary number but more or less doable even if it was going to blow a massive hole in our credit limit and savings. As of yesterday it was up to 12k, which is where things started to get dicey. As of today we're sailing past that and high-fiving red-blinking satellites of credit limits.

And Samus is still dying. When she comes home tomorrow she'll be dying still. All we wanted to buy was time for her to die comfortably at home and not alone and afraid in the back of an emergency vet clinic (an idea we absolutely could not stomach) and we're probably going to manage that, but when that stress-free death comes with a $14,000 price tag--that's not even taking into account the price of euthing at home and cremation, which from previous sad experience generally comes to about $1500.00 in NYC--it's a little harrowing.

So we're asking for some help, so what little savings we've scraped together and good credit we've built don't get fully piledriven through the concrete deep into bedrock it's hard and time-consuming to climb back out of. I'm not even trying to get the full amount covered here, but any little bit would be massively beneficial in making a shitty, stressful time slightly less so.

Samus gave us sixteen years of mostly benevolent rule, tolerated our smelly, hairless ape presences admirably, and posed for more magnificent photos than I can count. I don't know what the world will look like once she's gone out of it, but these days any good thing passing sort of feels like cut #999 out of the proverbial thousand. Our other cat is already deep in mourning and in an act of impeccable timing our landlord decided to raise the monthly rent $150.00 yesterday. Getting this bill at least partially taken care of won't save Samus or fix any of this other shit, but it goddamn well won't hurt, either.