Hello,

I’m from Germany and I have a queastion regarding my ca. 25 year old cat. Her true age is unknown as we got her from a shelter. She was in good health and my vet couldn’t believe her age.
She was diagnosed with pancratic cancer in October 2014. It was a random find, as she didn’t show any symtoms.
It was already around 5x4cm in size and I decided for surgery with the option of putting her down if it looked to bad.

The tumor was a solid mass in the pancreas. Small nodules were found in the surrounding tissue, but alls the other organs looked fine. The tumor was removed, which was easy duw to not being connected too much to the surrounding tissue.
My vet told me that the prognosis was still poor, with most patiens not surviving more than 6 months after diagnosis.

Whisky woke up normally and had no problems with eating/digesting afterwards. She was totally fine until after 10 months – in July 2015 – a new small tumour was found, around the size of a cherry.
We decided to wait how fast it will grow, as she still showd no signs or symptoms.
Las Friday on August the 8 I could feel that the tumour had grown fast – now back to old size. I drove to the vet and he confirmed that.
I knew if it grew so fats she would only have around one month more if it would start to cause her pain, so I decided for surgery again. She still was fine, always wanting no live and don’t show signs of old age.

This time it looked bad. Upon opening her up she already hat blood in her abdomen. The tumour was necrotic, starting with „tyrosis“ and half of the pancras was infected. The tumor started to fall apart when he touched it. Addiotionally not only th surrounding tissue had metastases, also the peritoneum now had some nodules. The other organs still looked fine. My vet said it looked very bad, normally he would put her down now, as the progmosis now was more than poor.

I still wanted to try it, and he did his best. Sadly she died during the wake up phase. Most likely it started bleeding again and she died of blood loss.

My vet told me that she would have died during the next days either way due to blood loss and infection during the next days. I now ask myself if she would still life if I didn’t have decided for surgery.
Or is what my vet said right and she would have died the next days either way, with that thing falling apart inside her. I trust my vet, but I have the feeling that I’m resposible for her death, that I have killed her somehow.

If needed I can provide pictures of the masses.

Thanks a lot for reading this wall of text!

Shiria

I have a female pit bull terrier (spayed) that is 10 months old. Pearl generally has a great disposition and gets along well with everyone including other dogs. The “problem” is that she is showing less and less interest in her dog food when first provided to her. And it’s the meaty stuff (Alpo cans)! I’m not too worried because she usually eats it eventually but she often will wait hours. Yes, Pearl is spoiled with treats and bits of human food but it seems so odd that she would rather eat whatever we might be having (e.g. a french fry) than this wet, meaty food. She weighs about 55 pounds and gets one 13 oz can in the morning and one in the evening. She also has a constant supply of dry food in a dish but she just picks at that upon occasion. She has a regular place to eat near where we eat and spend most of our time and her Alpo is given to her each time on a new (clean) dinner plate. We have one cat that ends up eating some of the food and Pearl doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, Pearl seems to be more interested in trying to eat the cat’s plain dry food than her own. In short, she seems to like eating most anything except her own dog food. Thoughts?