Our sweet, beautiful cat Octavia has been diagnosed with nasal lymphoma. She has a tumor growing quickly in her nasal cavity, between her eyes. The good news is that it has not spread to any other part of her body. It's treatable and we're lucky to live close to the only oncology department in our region. According to our new veterinary specialist, the treatment - stereotactic radiation therapy - works really well to treat this type of cancer in cats. Doing this treatment would let her live the rest of her life like she deserves. He also stressed that this type of cancer and treatment is not like those you see in humans or dogs, and that she wouldn't be in any pain. Discomfort and lack of appetite from the stress of appointments are the two major concerns.

The bad news is that this treatment is very expensive. In trying to find and confirm this diagnosis, we've already spent close to $4000. The estimate we just received for the radiation treatment is $15,000 in addition to that.

In our appointment today Octavia had a cytology performed on one of her lymph nodes to confirm the cancer has not spread there. We'll learn the results tomorrow and receive a detailed plan for our next steps. This will include scheduling her for a week of this intensive radiation treatment as soon as we can.

As many of you close to us know, we love her dearly. Christian was laid off from his job last August and we're still struggling to recover. We've been making sure we can pay our mortgage and buy groceries and cat food, and we've been managing to get by without cleaning out our savings.

This is going to wipe out our savings. It's everything we have left and more. And it's all going to be due at the end of her treatment.

If you know us you also know we hate accepting help. We've always tried to get by on our own but this time we need help.