Buster's Story Part 2

Buster went over the rainbow bridge on June 28, 2013.  I miss him so much.  It has been a couple of years now and could only write about what happened to him right now.He was a very good boy once he decided that it was OK to dine with me and the other cats.  Heck he didn't even get into many fights with others.  I watched and it was mostly the other cats that would pick a fight with him.

Here is Buster when he was healthy.

You see why his name was Buster.  His eyes looked like he was going to bust you.  LOL

Let me tell you about what happened up until the time of his passing over.  Oh I was there for the whole thing and he did come back to me a few days later and asked me why he had to die that way.  I told him that I didn't know.  Let me start from the beginning.

A few years after he got neutered and that awful experience for him and me, we took him to another Veterinarian.  I was treating him for worms.  He had a cough and that is one of the signs of worms.  He was also an outdoor cat and came in contact with all kinds of things.  He ate mice and some birds and who knows what else.  They get worms from eating those wild animals.  Each time that I would treat him for worms he would stop coughing and we thought that was the end of it.

One day he was coughing so much that he could not catch his breath and I knew something was wrong.  I took him to the veterinarian and told him how he was coughing and the treatment for worms that seemed to be working up until now.  So with that they did a check up on him to make sure that it was nothing else.  Nothing showed up and so they gave him a stronger de-wormer and one that killed more worms that they med that you get from the store.  That seemed to have worked for about a year.  He started up again and we took him back to the veterinarian.  Again nothing showed up in his test results and was given another de-wormer and some anti-biotics just in case there was something they missed.  Everything was fine again for a year or so.

He really never liked to be picked up and he liked to be pet as he circled my legs so I really didn't get a real good look at him.  He was Buster and he always did that.  One day though I got to look at his face and noticed something that was not there before.  He had some growths on his eyebrows.  I took him back to the veterinarians for a complete check up.  They gave me anti-biotics to clear up the infection.  They also sent a biopsy of his blood word and of the pus that they got from his sores to a lab.  He was on those anti-biotics for more than two weeks.  His sores opened up and we all thought that they were going to heal.

Six weeks passes and his eyebrows are not healing or doing any better.  Each time that I had to clean them out he would bite me and growl at me.  Oh I knew he was in lots of pain and they did not give him anything for that.  Poor Buster.  I was so sad for him.

The veterinarian asked us if we wanted to do a cancer screening.  We could not afford that and if he had cancer that bad we knew that we could do nothing for him.

The veterinarian was nice enough that he paid for the cancer screening and called us back to tell us that Buster did, in fact, have cancer.  It started out as pulmonary cancer and that was why he was doing all the coughing.  No one knew it and it didn't show like that.  We all thought that it was worms because he would clear up for so long afterwards.  What no one ever suspected, even the veterinarian or the oncologist was that Buster's pulmonary cancer spread to his eyebrows.  The oncologist even said that he had never seen that in any animal.  Buster was the first.  The veterinarian told us they he gave all the tests and their results to the oncologist so that they could use them to find a cure or to study that since it has never happened before.

I miss Buster so much.