The Background

November 2007
I took Penny to the vet for a routine teeth cleaning. She's had gingivitis ever since we've known her. (She doesn't chew her food.) To get her teeth cleaned, she had to under anasthesia and staying at the vet's office all day. While she was under, the doctor called to say that she found a lump at her upper left jawbone / cheek area and that 2 teeth needed to be extracted there. She didn't know if the lump was 1) an infection or 2) a tumor. An abscess was pretty much ruled out because whatever this lump was, it was pushing out the 2 teeth, which came out really easily. She recommended that an x-ray be taken (see photo below) and that I schedule a meeting with a cat oncologist and have a biopsy done as soon as possible.

Penny was pretty stressed out after having two teeth pulled and spending a day at the vet, so we decided to wait until she was back to normal before subjecting her to an oncologist's visit. We first had to get through 3 days worth of painkillers (liquid, which she happily took mixed with milk) and 14 days of antibiotics. The antibiotics were pills, which she HATED to take. Crushing them up to mix with tuna and stuffing them into Pill Pockets both didn't work because the smell was too strong. David had to do the unpleasant task of prying her mouth open and jamming a pill down her throat every morning. Not fun, considering her mouth was hurting already from the extractions.

If the lump was an infection, and not a tumor, then the antibiotics should have helped to reduce it. But the lump was now visible in her cheek, whereas 2 weeks earlier, the lump was only detectible from inside her mouth.

Despite all the recent trauma, Penny's behavior was finally back to normal. She was social, purring, playful, and swallowing her hard catfood whole (weird, I know, but she never did like chewing in the entire 6+ years we've had her).

We were fairly certain that IF the lump was cancerous, we would not put her through chemotherapy because she was back to being a happy, content cat -- minus 2 teeth and some progressive loss of hearing over the past few months that we attributed to her age.

December 2007
I schedule a meeting with the oncologist anyway to talk about treatment options and see if she has any better idea of what the lump might be. We're pretty sure it's not an infection by now and my vet's guess was that it could be osteosarcoma (bone tumor).

Without doing a biopsy, the oncologist thought the lump is likely to be one of 3 things:
1) A Benign Tumor: best case scenario, not cancerous, but would cause complications with her left eye if it continued to grow.
2) Osteosarcoma (bone tumor): cancerous, a 3-6 month prognosis, course of treatment would be chemotherapy
3) Squamous Cell Sarcoma: a very agressive cancer, 1-2 month prognosis, course of treatment would be chemotherapy. Not what I wanted to hear, but a possibility given how fast the lump went from being undetectible to a size that you could visibly see and feel.

Chemotherapy would involve 16-19 radiation treatments, each time requiring our cat to be driven to the oncologist (which she hates) and undergoing anasthesia for the day. Considering it took Penny 1.5-2 weeks to recover from her previous anasthesia experience, we already knew that we would not subject her to chemo. Since knowing the results were not going to affect our treatment, we opted to not even do a biopsy on Penny. (A biopsy would've meant another day under anasthesia and the possibility of bacteria infecting the tumor because of it's location in the mouth.)

For tumors in other locations, a treatment possibility would be to amputate or cut it out. This was not an option for us because the lump is in her face.

The only intervention we are doing is giving her Peroxicam every other day, which the oncologist thinks will help reduce inflammation and possibly slow growth if the tumor is squamous cell carcinoma.

In summary, we don't know which kind of tumor she has and we won't be subjecting her to chemotherapy. We're going to just focus on giving her the best quality of life possible while she's still with us.