Confections For Cats

A reminder; Mathew was finally taken seriously 2-22-14 when he was sent to the hospital and a scan was done. Even then, the assumption was that he had been drinking his liver into a coma or some other horrible self-imposed illness. Mathew Journal  2-4-14      Wake up to another day of feeling like hell. Biting the skin off my lower lip. Pick and scratching skin raw. Sinister visions projected onto the back of my eyelids. Arms and legs sore. Hardly able to get myself into bed. Once eyes closed the visions return again. Played it fast-forward - too fast to ever identify what they are. My heart is aching from beating too fast. And I have constant dry mouth. My left leg drags behind me. Like a ghoul from a horror film. My aching body says “Take another warm bath.” M wallet and my mind say “Enough with the damn baths.” The itching was from the high bilirubin, due to the tumor invading the liver and strangling the bile duct...

One of the questions people have when I tell them about this rare cancer, is “What were the symptoms that Mathew had before he was diagnosed?” There is no one answer to that question. What were the symptoms at what point in time? What were the earliest symptoms? Hard to tell for certain, but in retrospect, I would say they started in High School. A serious of odd medical conditions with no real answer. In High School, he had pain in his groin and the fear was that between karate and high jumping in cheerleading one summer, that he had twisted his vas deferens an ultrasound of his testicles was done and nothing was seen. But later, he had similar symptoms, locking up of his left hip and pain which eventually affected his left leg. When his cancer was diagnosed it was wrapped around his kidney and renal artery.      2.  He had a back injury in wrestling, nothing serious, but they wanted an x-ray to be certain. There was a spot on his lung, they were...