01/15/2026
I am coming up on day two of losing my girl, Froot Loop, and I am not doing well.
She had a very small mammary mass removed back in April; we knew it was cancerous, but it was so small and the vet cut a huge chunk out of her to try and make sure he got all of it in the hopes it wouldn’t spread. I knew it could come back. I just didn’t think it would. She seemed fine and normal for several months, then small things started to trickle in that I thought were all typical signs of aging; things like eating less, not being as spunky, and losing a little bit of weight. Then she started to develop a cough whenever I’d pick her up; again, I didn’t think much of it since she was a serial hairballer. But within the past month she rapidly dropped weight, quit eating entirely, and the cough worsened and I realized we had a suspicious lack of hairballs to make up for it. I had such a bad gut feeling about this that I panicked and started to hand feed her, hoping and praying that somehow this would fix it, but it didn’t, and we went to the vet, and my worst fear was confirmed: her lungs were full of cancer. And what I thought was scarring from her mass removal turned out to be another mass.
She was only 11 years old. I thought we had more time. I didn’t take that first mass seriously enough. We should have done chemotherapy but she was such an anxious cat that I had decided long ago I’d never put her through anything like that but I’m absolutely regretting it now. I don’t feel like I cherished her nearly enough in her final years and I just feel like I absolutely failed her and she’s dead now because of it. I don’t know how to possibly move on from this and honestly, I don’t feel like I deserve to. It truly feels like her life was cut short and I’d sacrifice anything to go back and redo everything just to have a chance at still having her here with me. A huuuuge piece of me died with her that day and I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, nor do I want to move on from it either because it just feels like I’m abandoning her all over again.