Think of the children

We decided to go with the at-home oral chemo for Maddy. Dragging her to the vet oncologist’s office once a week for 8 weeks plus once every two weeks for four months for the IV chemo doesn’t sound like a good deal for Maddy. Never mind the fact that the IV chemo is more than twice as expensive; it only adds 6 months to her life versus the at-home chemo. I’d rather her be comfortable and healthyish at home for less time, and no, I’m not willing to just let her dribble off with what’s left of her life. As I type this, she’s in my lap nomnomnomming on my right wrist, as she’s wont to do when I type. This morning, she and Hazel got into a pitty-pat-pat fight in the floor which ended in Maddy actually jumping on Hazel’s back and chomping down on her neck, like she used to do before she got so sick. Lulu mrowr-rowr-rowr!ed and scampered off, prompting Guy to laugh and me to holler after her down the hall, “Lulu, you got pwnd!” It reminds me of my sister and me. She’s two years older and was therefore bigger for most of our childhood, and inevitably she could throw me off whatever bed we were wrestling on. Even as teenagers when we were evenly matched and even when I had a 20-pound advantage on her, she could still throw me off the bed. Even as 20-somethings when I weighed a little less but had a lot of muscle, still ‘twas my ass flying into the floor. When Kitty visits in October, I want a rematch.

I called Mom last night and caught her up on Maddy’s progress and our decision on the chemo. She was glad to hear about Maddy still being fairly frisky for a 10.5-year-old cat with cancer. We chatted on about various topics, and we somehow got on the topic of these damn kids with their short attention spans and inability to entertain themselves without a television. I thanked Mom for not having the TV on a whole lot when Kitty and I were small—I really think it made a difference in our cognitive abilities and our academic and professional success in general.

“That TV not being on was your call,” Mom said.

Huh?

“I used to watch soap operas,” explained Mom. “On one of them, there was a car wreck in which a baby was badly hurt, and it lingered and was in the hospital, and they’d even show it sometimes with tubes and wires hooked up, and the characters were always talking about what to do with the baby and if it was gonna live, and I think it eventually died, but…you were just a little thing, and you’d sit there and ask me ‘Mama, why did they do that to that baby? Why did they hurt that baby? Is that baby gonna be okay?’, so I cut it off. Some of the other women I knew would talk about soap operas, and I’d say ‘I don’t watch them anymore, they upset my children and I can’t have that’. So, after Sesame Street and The Electric Company, that TV went off and stayed off.”

Well, we must think of what’s best for the little ones in our care, whether it’s the TV they watch or the medical treatment they should have.