China countdown: 11

According to my google calendar, as of today my cat China only has 11 chemo treatments left. I think my bf is actually sad about this since we have been having lunch together every time she has a treatment ever since we met. I guess he has a point...I'm not sure we'd ever go to Paradiso in San Leandro for lunch OR dinner if we weren't waiting for China to have her treatment, and Paradiso is a nice East Bay treat.

Besides, there is something about getting away in the middle of a weekday that always feels so decadent.

I was going through China's paperwork yesterday. I was planning to add up all of her treatment costs to find out exactly how much it really was. Argh, there are so many, though. At least they are getting cheaper. Her first trip to BAVS was about $2200...something I totally freaked out about at the time. AND she was going once a week for a while, AND I had to hire a car and driver during that time. Now it's more like $220 or 1/10th the price of the original visit each time and she goes only once every four weeks AND we have a nice lunch. Oh, plus she seems to have finally gotten used to it and hardly freaks out at all. She didn't even hide in the closet when she got home today.

I realized how lucky we are today when I was talking to a woman in the waiting room at BAVS who said she has been taking her pet in THREE TIMES A WEEK for radiation treatments. Whoa. Radiation is expensive and time consuming. It also has weird side effects. China's radiation treatments seem to have somehow robbed her of her ability to purr, and they think that it may have been the radiation that turned her into a crazy sneezing snot-blowing machine as well, although I think that might be from the exploratory surgery she had at the local vet where they also removed most of the lymphoma mass from her nasal cavity before she ever started at BAVS. She now sprays snot all over my monitors, bedding, windows...nothing in the path of her constantly running nose is safe, and I'm afraid she may continue doing this indefinitely.

Hopefully China will actually be looking forward to her chemo trips by next July, because we are thinking of still bringing her there after her treatments are over, just drop her off and go to lunch...it makes such a nice tradition.