Emotional Roller Coaster

I’m so incredibly tired of things going wrong. I’m tired of all of my hopes and dreams and wishes being just within reach and then crushed. I’m tired of feeling like I did something wrong to piss off the world.

While this all is not directly about our Journey to Baby Kneeland, it’s the journey in our life that creates obstacles to reaching Baby Kneeland. 

Before Steven and I met I had my two fur babies with me, Gizmo and Gadget. I adopted Gizmo in 2007 and Gadget that next year in 2008. We’ve had a rough road the first few years. Gizmo landed wrong from jumping off the counter and broke his hip when he was a little over a year old. He needed to have surgery to remove the ‘ball’ portion of the ball and socket on his hip because it was fractured so badly. This allows cartilage to replace/regrow in the area to regain functionality of his leg. At this time I was also treating Gadget for an eye infection since we found out he contracted the feline herpes virus when he was born (this is an upper respiratory infection that can cause issues). I was only a junior in college and I was as poor as a…you guessed it…college student. I ended up using a portion of my student loan to pay for Gizmo’s surgery and thankfully he healed up very nicely! 

About 2 years later we have an incident with using Hartz flea treatment. I found a flea on my, inside only, cats and it was a Friday night so I figured I would pick up some flea treatment at Walmart and then buy the brand name stuff at the vets office on Monday. BIG mistake. I bought Hartz flea treatment and put it on Gizmo and Gadget. Within 10 minutes they started acting really funny. Breathing heavy, acting lethargic, just not being themselves. I looked up Hartz online to see if they could be having a reaction, as I never used flea treatment before. The first thing that popped up with a site dedicated to pets that have passed away after using Hartz brand flea treatments. I threw both cats in the tub and washed them off while calling the emergency vet. I took them right in. One of them started having seizures and the other was panting and drooling. It was a long night at the emergency vet. After a few hours they sent us home and said to keep an eye on them for the next few weeks because it would be touch and go determining how badly the treatment affected them. 

Within the next few weeks we made about 5 trips back to the vet’s office to be monitored and be given different medications. Luckily both were able to pull through it. I filed a complaint with Hartz and was compensated for the vet bills, luckily, but it does not compare to what we were put through.

Fast forward a few more years and I start to notice that Gadget is breathing heavier than normal. He was eating, drinking and acting fine, just breathing at a quicker pace. After a day or so I take him into the vet. Turns out he has feline asthma and the majority of his lungs were filled with fluid. The vet informed me that he had never seen a conscious cat with that much fluid in the lungs. Gadget stayed in the vet’s office for an entire week being hooked up to oxygen and given medication to remove the fluid and be monitored. They wanted to keep him until his breathing rate returned to normal. Gadget gets incredibly stressed in the vet’s office, which is bad for asthma, so his breathing rate stayed elevated. They finally released him at the end of the week, even though his breathing was still above normal, and told us to bring him in that Monday for a checkup. We brought him back on Monday and they kept him the next two days with more oxygen. During this time I was sick and had been diagnosed with hypothyroidism and was about 1 month into my 3 month sinus infection, I was exhausted and my hair had started to fall out. 

Once we got Gadget back he came with a kitty inhaler, and two different types of medications. Over the next 3 years Gadget has been in and out of the vet’s office more times than I can count. He has only had to be kept overnight once or twice more- but we have had our fair share of emergency vet visits, different medications, we bought an oxygen tank, injections, etc. We took him in around December of last year and the vet told us that we wouldn’t need to take him in again. The asthma had damaged his lungs and airways so badly that there was nothing more they would be able to do. We were given a prescription for daily inject-able medication that should help for a while. But once those stopped helping…that would be all they could do. So we are living every day monitoring Gadget and spending as much time with him as we can and giving him all the love we can. 

Now today, I get news that Gizmo is sick as well. A few days ago Steven noticed that Gizmo had a small bump on his left side. Being the worry warts we are we set up an appointment at the vet. I was at work so Steven took him in before his shift. They told us that it is a reaction from one of his vaccinations, most likely the feline leukemia vaccination. In about 1 out of 10,000-30,000 cats this reaction takes place where the body starts forming tissue around the injection site that can create an injection site sarcoma/tumor. Our vet thinks that we may have caught it early enough before it turns into a deep tumor and becomes cancerous. We go back in two weeks to have it surgically removed and have it biopsied. If it has already turned cancerous his chances are slim of living a long, healthy life. Even when removed and treated with chemo and radiation it has a very high likelihood of it returning as early as a few months later or within the year. This condition is commonly fatal when cancerous. 

My cats are my children. They have been since I adopted them. I knew I may never be able to have kids so they mean the world to me.  When Steven told me what was wrong I was immediately upset about Gizmo being sick but also upset about how much it would cost to remove the lump. It was never a question of if we would do it, it was knowing that we were going to do it and being upset. 

During the time that Steven took Gizmo to the vet, I had a brief phone call appointment with the fertility clinic’s financial advisor. We went over pricing for IVF treatments for me and what insurance would and would not cover. While we are still short of what we need, I was starting to feel a little more confident that this would be possible. Knowing what everything went towards and how much it was made me feel like ‘We’ve got this’. And then I called to see how the vet appointment went with Gizmo. All of my spirits were crushed. 

So now we just wait. We wait and see when Gadget gets to his breaking point. We wait and see if this growth on Gizmo is cancerous. I wait and see when it’s the end for my fur babies.

I feel like I did the RIGHT thing in vaccinating and caring for my cats and instead of being rewarded with healthy, happy cats, they can develop cancer and die. I feel like in my life I always try to do the right thing, in the ‘right’ way (go to college, get my Bachelor’s, get my Master’s, get a job, buy a house, get married) and then I am punished for it. I am being punished that I went to school instead of starting to try for a family right away. I am being punished in the form of student loans that make it difficult to save up money for fertility treatments. I am being punished for trying to set up the best life possible. 

As if there are not enough emotional roller coasters to ride with infertility! I have my own theme park of despair going on inside my head on a daily basis. If it’s not one thing, it is definitely another.