It was a strange two weeks off work over the holidays. What one expects and what happens doesn’t always align. That’s what happened for us.

Toby’s mid-December appointment was postponed to New Year’s Eve day due to a bad wind and rain storm so we knew we’d have the normal rush of last-minute Christmas activity and then, other than a trip to the oncologist before the New Year, we’d all be able to relax.

No such luck.

Christmas day on our way to in-laws for dinner, we lost our way, and in attempting to turn left up a side road to turn around, a car came zooming past on the left, badly damaged our front bumper and cracked our grille. Luckily no air bags deployed and everyone was fine, but it could have been worse.

We all took a collective deep breath and recovered. We still had our Mini Cooper at home and the RAV 4 was still able to be driven. What could go wrong?

Mini decided she’d had enough. Going out to run an errand with her, she would not start. Dead battery? Maybe, but the lights were working.  We had to get her taken to a local repair shop, where the wait for a new starter was up to three weeks.

Now we had a dilemma. How to get Toby to the vet two hours away?  The RAV 4 (yes we named her ”Blue” because of her body color,) was drivable, barely. Her driver-side headlight aimed now at the ground and the broken fender pointed close to the left front tire. No way we’d be able to safely drive it from Skowhegan to Scarborough and back. So with no reliable car we had to rent one for the trip.

Getting Toby into a large cloth pet carrier is tricky. For one thing he’s a big cat, being some mix of Maine Coon, a well-known large breed. We discovered Toby is so strong and long, he pushes against the zippers holding the front flap shut and “unzips” the carrier. Not something we wanted to have happen on the way to the car or while we were driving. Well, we had a solution derived from another cat previously mentioned in earlier essays — Genny.

Genny was smart and she was cunning. She weighed maybe seven pounds and was half of Toby’s size.  But she was great at escapes. After placing her in the carrier, while you weren’t looking, she would slip a paw at the end of the closed zipper and pull. With enough pulling and wiggling, she’d have a hole big enough to get her head through and her body was soon following. The only way we could keep her in was to literally padlock all the zippers together. There were some odd looks when we took her to the vets, with three padlocks at strategic zipper points. But she never escaped on one of these trips. Toby quickly inherited this padlocked carrier.

We’ve learned to be careful on the day of a trip. First, we learned a couple of doses of Gabapentin before a trip helped calm him down, but plaintive cries could occasionally be heard from the back seat, where we had secured his carrier.  Second, don’t make eye contact or say his name. He knows by your body language something is up — likely something he won’t like. Third, stand the carrier upright and pour him in like a hairy waterfall, and quickly zip the front flap, padlock it and lay it down flat.  Let the cat mrrrallls begin….

This was only Toby’s second trip to MVMC (Maine Veterinary Medical Center). Car rides are not his favorite thing.  A couple of rules of the road with Toby: if there’s no sounds coming from the carrier there’s no need to check he’s OK. Any moving of the carrier or eye contact through the front flap screen and it sets him off on a short session of cat complaints. Also, don’t mention his name.  He knows it mean him and he responds immediately.  Around the house it means he’ll come running and mrrting up to me; in the car, in the prison of a carrier, it means additional caterwauling for a time. This is after taking the Gabapentin….  But it was an uneventful trip down for all of us.

My worries for Toby over the last month and a half since his last visit with Dr. Philibert, the oncologist, was that the Palladia wasn’t working; that the lymph glands would grow larger; that he was losing weight. Or that his liver or kidneys were being damaged by the chemo and the “cure was worse than the disease.”

 So a relatively short appointment later, we passed Toby over to the vet tech (after a struggle getting him out of the open carrier) and she whisked him away for blood and urine tests.

 One of the better moments was when the vet tech carried him tightly in her arms back into our exam room, his massive body draped across her, and she announced she loved this cat. She went on to describe how she put him down in the lab while preparing to take the blood and urine and how he went exploring around the room — something we never imaged Toby brave enough to do. He continues to amaze us.

A quick consultation with Dr. Philibert reassured us Toby is doing as well as can be expected. No sign of kidney or liver damage from the Palladia and his weight is even up from his last visit!  Best of all, his lymph nodes have reduced in size since he was last seen — an indication the chemo treatment is working, for now.

So Toby will remain on the chemo treatment for another month, when we’ll do all of this again and we’ll evaluate how he’s doing. Long term prognosis? Who knows? We’ll take it a day at a time, and enjoy him as we go. He’s finding a good quality of life, running through the house like a crazy kitty or sleeping on my lap for hours at a time at night. We’ll be here for him.  It takes a team to help him, and other pets like him, going through cancers and other life-threatening diseases. We know there’s darker times ahead for him, but it’s one day at a time, enjoying him as much as we can along the way.

And the car situation? Well we took “Blue” to the collision center, where they gave us the estimate (all covered by our insurance, except for our standard deductible) and a date to bring it back in for the body work — six months from now!  Luckily, it is fully drivable, and with an adjustment to the headlight and wiring up the broken fender to keep it away from the tire, we are good to keep using it. And the Mini Cooper? The three week turn around estimate was reduced to three days, so we are back to being mobile.  2025 is looking up and I hope it’s better than 2024, but you never know….