Ode to Kimchi

Sorry for being MIA lately. March and April have been kicking my butt in more ways than one. I've been preparing for a conference, which I just returned from, and then next week I'm off back to the motherland for a couple weeks for some personal family reasons that preoccupied me for much of March.

Throughout this craziness, we learned that our 6-year old baby kitty, Kimchi, had bone cancer in her left hind leg and needed to have that leg amputated. She'd been limping on and off for a while, but it never affected her lifestyle, but when we took her to a new vet he was immediately concerned enough to take an x-ray...and then a biopsy...and then when we learned it was cancer, he recommended we deal with this as soon as possible.

So we did. Her surgery was on Tuesday, and we're bringing her home today. Online references and anecdotal sources say that animals do very well with three legs, they don't suffer the psychological stress and pain that humans do over losing a leg, and if the cancer was giving her pain, then perhaps she may be even happier after the surgical site heals because she will be pain-free. Plus she wasn't using the leg recently much at all anyways, so she'd already done half the adjustment before the surgery anyways. No metastases detected by x-ray, and metastasis risk for this sort of cancer in cats is low. So hopefully we'll have a happy three-legged Kimchi for many years to come.