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 MEET
SOME OF OUR PATIENTS: “Poppet"
“Poppet” had a slight cough for a couple of weeks and hadn’t
been his usual playful self. One afternoon, he suddenly collapsed
and his worried owners rushed him down to The Veterinary Cat
Clinic, where it was clear all was not well with his chest.
He was struggling to breathe properly and we only started to
get an improvement after 25 minutes of oxygen therapy and the
administration of drugs to help clear his chest. Once we were
happy he was stable, we needed to carry out further investigation
to find out what was going on in his chest.
An x-ray was taken and we were shocked to see that most of
his lungspace had been replaced by a dense, even shadow. Further
tests confirmed our worst fears: the shadow was a tumour in
the thymus gland. The thymus gland is part of the immune system
and is involved in the production of white blood cells. In adult
cats, it's usually a whispy, insignificant remnant of tissue.
Poppet's thymus had been overtaken by a solid form of leukaemia
(cancer of the white blood cells) called lymphosarcoma. In cats
this is frequently caused by the Feline Leukaemia Virus (FeLV)
but fortunately we knew that Poppet didn't test positive for
this infection. Surgery doesn't help with this problem so our
only chance of helping Poppet was to consider chemotherapy to
try to shrink the tumour. We couldn't offer a cure with this
but we could put the tumour into remission.
 The
Cat Clinic staff and the owners felt that Poppet deserved the
chance of leading a near normal life, even if this was only
for a few months. Poppet's treatment consisted of him coming
in to The Veterinary Cat Clinic once weekly and now once monthly
for a chemotherapy drug to be carefully injected into a vein,
and 2 lots of tablets which the owners give at home.
His treatment has now been going on for about 15 months now
and he has had no more problems with his breathing. We have
to be honest and say that Poppet is doing very much better than
anticipated. The longer we go on, the more hopeful we become
about achieving complete remission but we still have to be realistic
and take each day as it comes. Poppet is one of the patients
who make our jobs worthwhile. We've gone from a cat literally
dying in front of our eyes to a normal, playful cat we now see
monthly and as long as the owners, vets, nurses and, most importantly
Poppet, are happy then we'll continue with his treatment.
Any mention of chemotherapy tends to cause understandable concern
in cat owners. We hear stories of people losing all their hair
and feeling extremely nauseous when they receive chemotherapy.
Is it fair to put a cat through the same? I must admit, at the
start of my career, I was quite hesitant about using chemotherapy
but I've been very pleasantly surprised at how resistant cats
are to any of the side-effects of chemotherapy. The only "problem"
we've had with Poppet is that his whiskers have fallen out and
his coat his now very soft and a bit sparse. Living in Scotland,
he does tend to feel the cold a wee bit but on his most recent
visit, it looks like we've got a little more hair back!
 ADDENDUM:
Poppet reached the two year stage on chemotherapy with no apparent
recurrence of his tumour. We weaned him off his chemotherapy
and held our breaths. We're delighted to say that there has
been no recurrence of his cancer to date.
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