Friday started out OK. I laid in bed thinking about cleaning the pile of papers off the kitchen counter. I got up and shuffled out into the living room, drank some tea, and read the paper. Honey came over and lied down on my lap, and I noticed that her breathing was really heavy. “Do you think something’s wrong with her?” I asked Kevin. “Maybe,” he said. “Should I call the vet?” “I think so.”

Honey had slept with us the past two nights, which she has never done. I thought she was just getting more affectionate. Kevin said he didn’t think she had eaten anything at all on Thursday. And Friday morning she was just lying there on my lap, with no energy.

I called the vet and they said they could get her in at 4:30 that afternoon. They asked about her symptoms and I said “labored breathing and lethargy and she’s not eating,” and they said it could be an emergency and I’d better bring her in right now.

OK, things weren’t so bad. “Could be an emergency,” but not “it’s a definite emergency.” She was probably fine. She’s Honey, the fiesty fighter kitty who loves to wrassle with Winnie and hunt and devour mice and any other small animal she can get her paws on. Kevin had told me that he’d found a mouse’s head and tail in the driveway earlier in the week when I was gone. Maybe the mouse had eaten poison somewhere and this made Honey sick?

At the vet’s office it looked like everybody who needed to bring their pet in was there. The place with packed, mostly with dogs. I hated having Honey there in her carrier, knowing she was scared.

A tech came and whisked her away. And I waited. And waited. They asked if it was OK to do x-rays because clearly something was wrong. Of course, do the x-rays.

More waiting. The crowd in the waiting room thinned out. The receptionist offered me coffee, and I asked for water. I forgot to drink it. I tried to read “cat fancy” and the dog magazines. I called Kevin, who was helping his friend remodel his basement. And I waited some more.

Finally I went into the exam room and talked to the doctor. Honey was still in the back, and that was the worst thing, knowing she was being poked and prodded in that room there without me. What a horrible, frightening thing for a kitty. The vet showed me the x-rays. Small parts of her lungs were black, which means they were OK. But there was a huge area in the middle of her chest that the vet couldn’t see because there was something very big there. It could be fluid, it could be a mass. It could be lymphoma, it could be lymphosarcoma.

I don’t remember the chronology of everything because all of a sudden things were scary. The vet did an ultrasound, and tried to draw fluid from her and said she was only able to draw a tiny drop, not a good sign. She said she was going to try to draw the fluid again, and this time she got a little more. The first slide showed lots of big, bad-looking cells, which indicated lymphosarcoma, very bad, she said there was a 30% chance survival rate. The other slide showed some OK cells mixed in with the bad ones, which could mean lymphoma, a 60% survival rate.

The vet kept saying she “wasn’t a pathologist,” so she couldn’t be sure what it was. She thought I should take Honey to the University of Illinois Vet Center in Champaign. I’d heard plenty of talk about the U of I center; it’s where pet owners took their animals who were in critical shape. I’d heard it was outrageously expensive, but they had top-notch doctors. The vet kept saying that they had oncologists there who might be able to draw more fluid, and would have a better chance of diagnosing Honey.

I wasn’t ready for the U of I. What if this vet was wrong, somehow? I talked to Amy on the phone and she called her vet, so I could get a second opinion.

We’d been at the vet for two hours, and I brought Honey home and she sat under the glass-topped coffee table in the living room, slightly swaying. She wouldn’t lie down. I brought up the blanket she’d been sleeping on in the basement, and she laid down on it. I think she slept. I gave her water, kitty treats, but she didn’t eat or drink. They had shaved two big patches of fur off either side of her stomach. It was very sad.

We had an appointment with Amy’s vet at 3:50. It seemed like Honey was resting OK. Maybe this vet would give us some good news. I called Kevin and he came home and we took her to the second vet.

We waited for a while, and there were lots of dogs at this vet, too. Dogs don’t seem to be as tortured at the vet’s office because at least they’re out in the open, not stuffed into a carrier. I feel like I saw so many different dogs while I spent so many hours at the vets that day. Some of them seemed perfectly happy to be there, but others were trembling.

Amy’s vet seemed very knowledgeable. She studied the slide I’d brought and described the mass and examined Honey and talked about a slight possibility that it might be a benign tumor which the U of I doctors could cut out, and she’d be fine. But she said that it was probably lymphosarcoma because that’s very common with cats of her age (6 ½). She said they might be able to treat lymphoma with chemotherapy, which would involved lots of trips to Champaign, lots of blood draws, and a cost of three to five thousand dollars. And she said that cats on chemo could live anywhere from two months to a couple of years, but that most died in chemo.

Horrible. She said if it was lymphosarcoma, nothing could be done. And that’s probably what it was. But if we wanted to be sure, we needed to take her to the U of I. So I called them and asked if we could wait and bring her on Monday, and I gave them the information and they said “bring her in now.”

Oh God. We put her in the van and drove there. It takes about an hour and 20 minutes to get to Champaign, and Honey didn’t seem so bad. Her breathing was still labored, but she was lying on the floor of the van and how can you tell if a cat is in pain?

You can’t, I found out. We got to the vet clinic at 6:30 and the receptionist said “Honey?” and we said yes and I went into the bathroom, figuring we’d have a wait, but by the time I got back they had already taken her away.

They were fast. It’s a teaching clinic, and the fourth-year student assigned to us came out and talked to us. He wanted to know if it was ok to do CPR on Honey if she went into cardiac arrest, and he described the CPR process on a cat, and we said no. It sounded horrible. The doctor came out and said they’d put her in an oxygen cage because she was in such bad shape.

By this time things took on a more surreal quality; I was exhausted from worrying and crying, and overwhelmed by the deluge of worse and worse news. They examined her and said that they were doing a CT scan study and she could get one for free – but that she’d have to stay in the hospital all weekend at $1,000 a day. A torturous experience for her, we knew, plus so expensive, and what would a CT scan do for her? They said they were sure it was a mass and probably lymphosarcoma and if it was lymphoma, instead, that would involve chemo. I mentioned the begin mass possibility and the doctor didn’t have hope that that’s what it was, and he said if it was a mass, that surgery would be very risky.

Worse and worse. Worse and worse. He recommended having her put to sleep. She was in horrible shape and she wasn’t going to get any better.

They left us alone to talk about what to do, and Kevin and I agreed that we would take her home for the weekend and at least have that time with her, and if she got worse, we could take her to the emergency clinic. So the day went from taking Honey to the vet because maybe she was having a crisis, to deciding that at least we’d have a few more days with her.

They came back and we told them what we wanted to do, and the vet said, no, he didn’t think we should take her home. It was too risky, her lungs could burst and be filled with fluid and she wouldn’t be able to breathe at all and that would be even more horrible. He said he would try to draw more fluid from her lungs, and he’d bring her out and we could decide.

More torturous waiting. They ushered us into a comfortable room with a couch and a couple of chairs and lots of pamphlets on the walls about grieving for your deceased pet and dealing with cancer. Plus there were two big boxes of kleenex.

They brought her in. At least she was there with us. The vet said she was a little more comfortable because he’d been able to draw off some fluid and taken some pressure off her and she’d been sedated.

She lay on Kevin’s lap and I petted her and we knew we had to have her put to sleep, right then and there. The vet asked if we wanted to be there and we agreed that we did.

They asked if we wanted to have her cremated, and we said no, we wanted to take her home with us. They asked if we wanted to have her paw prints in clay, and we said yes. I will say that the U of I is a caring place, besides being so incredibly knowledgeable and thorough.

We assumed they’d take us back to that room in the back that in my mind is a horrible sterile operating place. But after a while the vet came back with the syringes and they did it right there, with Honey on Kevin’s lap. It was so quick, it happened so fast, and she was gone.

The vet said that they were able to run a test based on the sample they took from her, and it was, indeed, lymphosarcoma.

We got home at 11:30. We buried her yesterday morning, down by the lake, and sprinkled wildflower seeds over her.

Last night we ran into somebody who said “how are you guys, what’s new, anything happening?” and we just said “fine, nothing.” No desire to describe the events, no desire to burst into tears.

It all happened so quickly. At least she didn’t suffer for a long time, at least she was a happy kitty and had a good life. She loved climbing up on the roof at our old house when Kevin was replacing the roof, she dropped a live mouse in the middle of the kitchen when we were having a dinner party, she scaled our tall fence and anything else she could find even though her front claws had been de-clawed. She was very sociable, enjoying hanging out in the same room with us, but just not too close. She was a very good kitty.