Tabby's surgery

So. A couple weeks ago we took Tabby up to the veterinary specialists in Burlington, VT for her surgery consult. The vet told us that the mass was not in the worst possible spot luckily, but that it was still a bad location. He tries to get at least a 2-3cm margin all the way around any tumor, and because Tabby's was right on top of (and possibly attached to) her spine he could only go so deep. If he has to he will remove the spiny processes of her vertebrae as well. I was a little surprised when he told us that we could leave her there and have the surgery done that very day - I had figured they would be booked for at least the next several days! But because we weren't able to discuss it with my Mom we decided to wait and talk with her, and then call back and schedule the appointment. We made it for the next Thursday, November 1st.
So Thursday Nov. 1st arrived and my Dad dropped Tabby off in Burlington. I was able to get the next day off work so that I could talk to the vet about how the surgery went when we picked her up. Before picking her up we went to the University Mall, and I got several things I had had my eye on. :-) Then we headed for the veterinary clinic. The vet said that he felt they had gotten good margins around the tumor, but that we wouldn't know for sure until the histopath results came back. The technician who brought her out said that everyone there loved her, and that she had been purring almost the whole time she was there after waking up. She's such a happy cat. :-)
A couple days later the histopath results came back, and the margins were good, they got all of the tumor! So that's a good sign. I know that fibrosarcoma is not a good cancer and can reoccur, but we are optimistic about it, and of course we hope that it never comes back.

:-(

About a week before I started working at Veremedy my dad noticed a lump on Tabby's back (Tabby is one of our 3 cats). When I went to visit my parents I checked out the lump - it was hard and immobile, and about the size of a grape. I didn't think it was very good so after I had been back at Veremedy for a couple days I brought her in to be looked at. One of the vets examined her and another performed a fine needle aspirate (a procedure where a needle on a syringe is pushed into the mass and the syringe plunger is drawn back to pull cells into the syringe - the cells are then sprayed onto slides, stained, and examined under a microscope). When the vet later examined the slides she saw various normal cells but also some fibrocytes which would point to fibrosarcoma. Because of these and the location (on the spine a few inches back from the shoulder blades) the two vets who had looked at Tabby feared it might be a vaccine-related fibrosarcoma, and they recommended that I bring her back the next week for surgery to have a piece removed and sent out for biopsy. I brought her in for surgery on Tuesday, October 2nd and the sample was sent out to a diagnostic lab. I got the results back yesterday and they weren't good.. Tabby has a grade II fibrosarcoma of the aggressive recurrent type (in other words, cancer). The lab recommended we take her to an oncologist for consultation. My parents have already decided that they want to do the aggressive surgery needed to remove the tumor even though it will likely cost more than $1,200. So, my mom is going to get an appointment with an oncologist for Tabby as soon as she can and then we will see what happens. We will do our best to make sure that Tabby's "golden years" are happy, comfortable ones.