Decline

Cancer can be a strangely incongruent disease: subtle, slow almost silent.

Until it isn’t.

One year ago yesterday, Bella was as playful, friendly, and quirky as she had even been.

A year ago today, everything changed. She became lethargic, uninterested in playing and struggling to eat.

We’d seen the warning sign for several days; we knew this day would come, and we feared it for weeks, but there’s really no way to prepare for it when the change happens.

I was fortunate enough to have a long break between semesters when, for the most part, Bella was relatively healthy. The warning signs were there of course. The tumor under her jaw ulcerated a few days before Christmas, and another tumor, her third, appeared just above her right shoulder earlier in January. But for the most part, Bella soldiered through much like she always had, cuddling, playing, and sprawling on the loveseat.

These were precious days, but the specter of her death, the knowing that we would lose her soon, cast a pall over the break. I cried in stores, when she crawled in my lap, and quietly in my office. I was grieving her weeks before she died.

The turn came in stages in the week after we returned to Syracuse: the new tumor grew almost exponentially in a matter of days. she scratched more often, and most concerningly, she struggled to swallow her food.

The night before everything changed, she cried in her sleep as she had for years. Her cries were grainy, raspy, throttled.

She refused to eat the next day and showed no interest in playing. We gave her Churu and tuna, but she often struggled to swallow anything we gave to her.