Tonya Plank's Blog

Happy 2023, Everyone!

It’s been ridiculously long since I last posted.

2022 was a rather big year for me. I sold my house in Arizona and moved cross-country with my dogs back to New York. But not the City this time; I moved to Rochester, up in Western New York. I was offered a job as an appellate attorney in the Monroe County Public Defender’s office. This is very similar to my old job in New York City. I’d thought often of moving back to NYC since leaving it in 2011, but since living in LA and Phoenix where I became accustomed to space and became mom to two dogs – one rather large – it just didn’t seem like I could fit back into my old lifestyle in my tiny Manhattan apartment very easily. So, when several friends moved to Rochester, I came to visit and fell in love with its charm, its history, its proximity to beautiful nature, and its affordability. Plus, for a small city, it has a pretty thriving arts scene. There are many museums and art galleries – this one is a favorite, a small arthouse film theater, two playhouses, a gorgeous music hall with a world-class philharmonic orchestra, a lovely ballet company, and an African-based modern dance one. It just seemed like a good fit.

So in January 2022 Sofia, Irina, and I moved, right after a pretty big snowstorm dumped quite a bit of snow in the area no less – hadn’t seen any real snow in 10 years, so that was an experience! I bought a sweet colonial in historical Swillburg, and spent much of the year fixing it up, acclimating myself back to my job as a criminal appeals attorney, and exploring my new home. I visited Toronto (about 2.5 hours away by car), my old neighborhood in NYC (about 5.5 hours by car, 7 by train), and took multiple trips to various beach parks on Lake Ontario and in the beautiful Finger Lakes region (about 45 minutes to a couple hours away depending on which lake you visit). The Finger Lakes soon became one of my favorite summer destinations, with gorgeous lake views, many, many wineries, and a couple of farm sanctuaries, including a new one, which made its own cross-country trek this year from California. At top is a pic is of me at Dr. Konstantin Frank winery on Keuka Lake.

I am loving my new area, and my new/old job. I am lucky to have a great boss that understands that writing briefs is an art form, which makes me feel fulfilled in my day job, something I haven’t experienced in a very long time. It’s also good to be back in the state in which I am barred to practice law, so I can do side work on behalf of animals and their protectors. I promptly joined a state bar association’s animal law committee and am helping organize panel discussions on animal law.

Now that I am finally settled, I am returning to my creative writing. I had to take the past year off from my WIP – a paranormal cozy mystery series set in a cat cafe and adjoining dog bar. It had been set in Sedona, AZ, but I’m so inspired to write about my new home, I am working on relocating it here. I’m hoping to release it later this year, with two other books in the series to follow shortly.

I am so very thankful to everyone who has enjoyed my writing, written reviews of my books, joined my newsletter, and continued to follow me on social media for the past several years. I haven’t produced new fiction in a while, and I am so grateful to readers who have stayed with me. I wish everyone a wonderful 2023 filled with lots of engaging reads!

A couple photos of Najma, taken in the apartment we were living in on 9/11/2001, in Hoboken, New Jersey. The bottom shows the phone (a landline, remember those!) on which I tried in vain all throughout that day to call relatives and coworkers letting them know I was okay. Both landlines and cell towers were awack for a while. Fortunately we had the internet and I ended up communicating with people by email. One of my most solid memories from that day is an email from my boss letting us know everyone in my office – two blocks from the World Trade Center – was accounted for and okay.

I was walking to the PATH station to take the train across the Hudson River into the WTC when the first plane hit. I watched everything from across the water before walking back home, in a daze. In addition to getting that email from my office, my other strongest memories of that day are waiting in my apartment building to hear all of my neighbors return home – thankfully they all did, and Najma continually sitting in the front window, ears perked up, looking in the direction of the WTC. She clearly knew something was up. But she was a cat, so of course.

Anyway, over the last twenty years I’ve written about that day so many times, I thought this year I’d reflect more on who I was twenty years ago than where I was. The pandemic has made me reflect repeatedly over the past year and a half, so it seems natural on this anniversary.

Twenty years ago today I was a newish lawyer working my second real law job, as an appellate public defender in lower Manhattan. I was living in Hoboken, New Jersey with a Russian blue mix I’d adopted from the ASPCA, whom I named Najma, after a fellow law school student. I was two years into the job and beginning to fit into it. I loved researching and writing briefs, hated oral arguments in court. I still loved books, primarily fiction, and as busy as the job was I still entertained dreams of a writing career. I remember that night the Brown University Alumni Club (I’d gotten my masters at that school), which I’d recently joined, was to have its inaugural meeting. Of course it ended up being postponed. But I would go on to befriend several people in that group who worked in publishing. Some of them tried to convince me to go into a publishing career, which, after much deliberation, I decided I couldn’t afford to do with my student loan debt and my desire to live without a roommate. That remains my greatest regret. My only real regret, actually. But I don’t want to harp on that.

Four months after that day I decided life was too short and I needed to start on that writing career, no matter how busy it would make me. I began classes at Gotham Writers Workshop in the Village, and started my first novel. I later got an agent and had my first, and likely only, experience with traditional publishing. I ended up indie publishing it and it won several awards. I left the public defender job about seven years later, and with it, the legal profession. I embarked on a writing career, penning articles for online magazines and eventually a blog that become popular in the dance world, before publishing six more novels. I now have a seventh on the way, whose main character is actually Najma, the Russian blue cat I lived with all those years ago. Though she passed away in 2005 of a congenital heart condition, she’s never really left my life.

It’s funny thinking what my 9/11/2001 self would have thought of what her life became 20 years later. She’d be shocked, that’s for sure. She would never have thought she’d return to the desert, live outside of a big city, buy a house, and have, instead of cats, dogs, one of which is a Belgian malinois / German shepherd mix! A large dog who kind of looks like a coyote? Never! She never would have thought she’d publish romance novels set in the world of ballroom dancing. She was so into “literary fiction.” And she’d never danced anything but ballet as a child! But would she be surprised to be writing a novel in which Najma is one of the two main characters, about a woman her age who’s left the law to begin a cat cafe? Probably not so much, although she’d be sad to know Najma is no longer physically with her. And she wouldn’t have known what a cat cafe was

She definitely could have imagined she’d become an animal advocate, since one of her favorite classes in law school was animal rights law, and she’d always loved animals. She easily could have imagined she’d write fiction about animals.

Hey, maybe I’ve actually come full circle, writing a series involving animal characters and using some of my criminal procedure background.

Anyway, enough navel gazing. If you’ve stuck with me this far, thank you! It’s good to reflect sometimes on who you once were and where you’ve come in order to chart a course for what’s ahead. On this most solemn of days, I wish you peaceful thoughts and happy continuing progress on life’s journey. I wish you all the excitement for life and hopefulness for the future that I felt at that stage of my life, and that, yes, despite the pandemic and the threat of climate change, I can’t help but still feel today.

MY CAT JEOFFRY BOOKSTORE AND CAT LOUNGE is now officially a nonprofit! I’d started it earlier as a book blog, but it is now an online bookstore for animal lovers, with links to adoptable cats. We are hoping to open physically in Phoenix, AZ, in Spring 2022, after the pandemic is over and it’s safe again to have crowds in a contained, indoor area. For now, please visit the website where we have links to our Bookshop storefront, and our Libro account for audiobooks and Hummingbird account for eBooks.

We will also have a small publishing arm, specializing in children’s books that foster empathy toward animals. We hope to have our first picture book out in Spring 2022. Once we get the store up and running, we plan to have writing events for kids so that we can publish a book of short stories written by kids about their favorite animal.

This is my passion project (apart from my own writing ) so I’m really excited about it! We are small right now but hope to grow. If you have publishing or bookstore experience and would like to volunteer or be on our board, please contact us at mycatjeoffrybooks [at] gmail [dot] com.

I think we “animal people” grieve so much when a beloved pet dies because a part of us dies with them. At least that’s how it’s always been for me. The part of me that died with my dear Katusha, who passed away a month ago from cancer at only eight years old, is the New York City cat girl. So I’m still grieving for the loss of my kitty, as well as the loss (at least for the time being) of that part of myself.

I adopted Katusha seven and a half years ago from the Los Angeles County shelter when I lived in West Hollywood, years after I’d moved out of New York. I’d wanted a friend for my cat, Rhea (whom I did adopt in NY, and who passed away two years ago, also from cancer). So I never actually lived in NY with Katusha. But I’ve quite frequently thought of returning. And, after she got sick I couldn’t stop thinking how different our lives would have been if we (she, Rhea, and Sofia, the chihuahua mix we adopted in LA) had moved back to NY after leaving California, instead of coming to Arizona. Of course, if we’d have done that, we never would have lived in this house I so love and that Rhea so loved and that Sofia so loves, and that is now so full of memories – most wonderful, some painful.

And we would never have adopted Irina, the always-excited malinois / German shepherd mix who looks like a coyote and scared the bejesus out of poor Kat for a good while. The dog I love dearly and whom I could never imagine living without, but who has also tested my patience and my dog handling abilities time and again.

Well, I recently had a dream that made me really think about my life and helped me put a lot of things into perspective.

When I first moved to New York in the early nineties (I feel so old!) I had a friend whose father was a doorman in a nice Upper West-Side apartment building. (I don’t have a picture of him, but the below picture is of the doorman in my own building, and me, at that same time, 1993.)

One day the friend and I were out and about and we had to visit her dad so she could get something (keys I think). Anyway, while we were in his building, a very elegantly-dressed elderly woman emerged from the elevator and walked through the lobby, full of energy and spark. My friend’s dad greeted her, wished her a happy birthday, and helped her into the cab he’d hailed for her. She was very sweet and thanked him profusely. After she took off, he told us she’d just turned 97. I remember thinking how wonderful that you could live to be such an age in such a big city and do so with such vigor and glamour. This was back when New York was expensive but not exorbitant like it is today, and you didn’t have to be an investment banker to afford a small place.

So my dream was weird, as dreams always are. In it I was somehow that woman. Obviously I was much later in my life than I am now. And I was living with a cat and a small dog. They weren’t exactly Katusha and Sofia, but they inhabited their essences, you know what I mean? In the dream I knew it was them, basically. I was happy looking out my window over Lincoln Center.

But then I started to remember the big “desert dog” I’d had long ago, who could never have fit into a small NYC apartment. And her always-happy face. And her silliness and constant excitement over her ball. And her barking. And her antics. And my always unsuccessful attempts to control her.

And I missed her so badly it hurt. I missed her and our lives back in the desert house with the back yard so very much.

I woke up in a sweat. And I realized I was happy here. Even though I loved my life in New York as the quintessential cat lady, I really loved big crazy dog and our lives in the desert. And I wasn’t ready to leave it yet.

(Above: with Najma, my first NYC kitty, in my Upper West-Side studio loft, around 2004.)

Maybe someday I will go back to New York. Maybe someday I’ll be that elegant old lady with the sweet petite fur babies in her one room apartment sprinting through a lobby on her way to her cab (or self-driving Uber, or Jetson air mobile?)  But for now, I’m happy being desert dog mom.

It’s been about a month now that my dear Katusha passed away and I’m still mourning her, as I always will in some form. She had an aggressive form of abdominal cancer and I didn’t even know she was sick until she suddenly stopped eating and drinking. It was too late to do much.

She was a few weeks short of eight years old, so very young for a cat. My other cat, Rhea, passed away only a little over two years earlier, also of cancer. She was only ten, and hers was a sarcoma on her head. I asked the vet if it was something in my house, in Arizona, in the air or water. But she said no; these are two very common forms of cancer in cats. Most likely something in their genetic codes.

I adopted Katusha seven and a half years ago when I lived in West Hollywood, CA. My job at the time had crazy hours and I felt badly because Rhea, whom I’d adopted in New York a couple years earlier before moving to CA, was alone for hours on end. I thought she needed a companion.

I saw a post on Facebook. It was kitten season and a woman fostering a litter found motherless on the street was required to return them to the high-kill LA County shelter she volunteered for since they were now old enough. She was worried and needed adopters. I spotted a cute-looking boy cat in the litter and called the foster. It turned out the boy cat had already been adopted and they only had a girl available. I was dubious about adopting a female because I worried two girl cats wouldn’t get along. But I picked this little one up – her name was Cinderella at the time because of her fondness for making a little bed for herself out of her foster mom’s shoes – and she immediately purred and let me cuddle her as much as I wanted. She was perfect for me. I called my vet and she told me that as long as everyone was spayed gender wouldn’t be an issue. So she was ours!

Katusha continued to love shoes, by the way. I changed her name from Cinderella because there was a Russian ballroom dancer I adored and I loved her name. Katusha seemed perfect for a cat

At first Rhea was pretty mad at me. Actually I think she kind of remained mad at me. She had the run of our fairly large apartment all to herself and now she had to share space with a little kitten who constantly wanted to play. But she soon learned to tolerate her new sister. And the vet was right – there were no fighting issues.

Katusha’s coat was the most amazing pattern! She was so playful as a small kitten, as I guess most small kittens are.

She and Rhea really loved that WeHo apartment with its big patio door and floor-to-ceiling windows that were perfect for bird-watching!

Unlike Rhea, who wasn’t very cuddly, Katusha loved to snuggle in my lap as I read. This is one of the things I miss most about her.

I volunteered at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. In Dogtown. And realized I really missed my dog from childhood, named very imaginatively by my five-year-old self, Fluffy. I lived in a pretty big apartment in LA and everyone in my building seemed to have a dog, and I knew there was room for a small one. One of my friends who volunteered with LA County posted a video on Facebook of a dog for adoption who looked ideal. She described her as shy. I went to West LA Shelter and met her. And we bonded on the spot. Sofia was perfect.

But not to the cats! I brought her home and she immediately chased them. Katusha was the most scared, and she nearly opened the locked window in her attempt to escape. Poor kitty. It took the better part of a year to get her to calm down and accept Sofia. Rhea was easier. You can read Sofia’s take on the whole thing if you like here.

But Katusha was good to me and she loved me. And for my sake, I believe, she eventually managed to get along with Sofia. I made her and Rhea a cat tree and she played in it, even with the crazy dog present down below. She eventually even shared the couch with the dog.

I grew weary of LA traffic and I really wanted to buy a house, which I knew I couldn’t afford in LA, so I decided to move back to Arizona, where I’m from. I thought of moving back to New York but … I’m actually not sure why I didn’t, to be honest. I missed my friends there, I missed the ballet, the culture. I missed my life there. But I think I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to return to all the noise and the lack of space and the ten plus hour work days. I’d done somewhat well self-publishing my novels and I’d remembered how angry people in traditional publishing were about the success of indie authors and Amazon and all and I didn’t really want to return to that negativity. Plus, I wanted to buy a house with a yard, see what that kind of life was like. My aunt was also ill at the time and she had no one to care for her. As you can see, I’m still trying to figure out why I didn’t return to New York…

Anyway, we moved back to Arizona. We rented a condo for a few months until I could get enough local work experience to qualify for a mortgage. Six months later, we moved into our first house.

Rhea loved the house. It had a bi-level living room, which I found so charming and full of character. And a balcony, which she couldn’t get enough of. It reminded me of the balcony of the loft in our New York apartment, which she loved to sit on and peer down. She loved to jump off the balcony onto the bookcase, little gymnast!

But I’m not sure how much Katusha liked the new house. She pretty much hung out in the walk-in closet in the master bedroom, which of course contained all my footwear. She still loved to cocoon herself in my shoes, or between the shoe boxes in the corner. She liked to hide. Perhaps it was because she had longer hair than Rhea and southern Arizona is warm and dry. She’d come out to the kitchen to eat, and use the guest bathroom, where I kept one of the litter boxes. But, unlike Rhea, who loved to climb the stairs, she never ventured up to the second floor to use the other bathroom’s litter box.

A year and a half after we moved in Rhea was diagnosed with a sarcoma on her head. She went through grueling stereotactic radiosurgery, which left her with large radiation burns that eventually became infected. Poor Rhea. I think it must have been traumatic for Katusha to see her sister so sick. I don’t really know how animals handle those kind of things.

A few months later Rhea passed away. Katusha came out of the closet a little more often but not much. She’d sit at the big patio window and look out back a little, but not much. Sitting at the window had always been more Rhea’s thing than Katusha’s, although Katusha seemed to like looking out the window in West Hollywood.

I began volunteering at my local SPCA. I felt Sofia, who’d become best friends with Rhea, missed her sister. She and Katusha got along but they weren’t besties the way she and Rhea were.

I did a couple of short-term fosters with some small dogs at the shelter and Katusha seemed to get along with them. I was amazed. She seemed to now be a dog-friendly cat.

Six months later, I decided to adopt another dog to befriend Sofia and hopefully Katusha as well. I went to the shelter to adopt a dog about Sofia’s size that I’d walked and read to and liked but that dog had gotten adopted by the time I got to the shelter. The adoption counselors encouraged me to look at other dogs since I was there with Sofia, so I did. I hesitantly brought home a dog for what’s called a slumber party to see if she’d get along with everyone in our household. They tested her with cats and found she wasn’t predatory and she and Sofia got along, so even though she was larger than the other dog I was thinking of, I decided to try it. We now had a big backyard, suitable for a larger dog.

When I introduced her to Katusha, Kat was immediately scared of her. No wonder. Irina was much bigger than Sofia. She was a German shepherd / Belgian malinois mix and kind of resembled a coyote with her coloring. Katusha hissed and swatted at her. Irina cried and ran off. I felt that was a good reaction. Irina was giving Katusha her boundaries and hopefully Katusha would soon come around.

But soon took much, much longer than I’d expected. I hired a total of three private trainers and took three group classes. I worked hard on getting both of them to like each other, for many, many months to no avail. I moved Katusha’s litter box and food into the master bedroom and kept her shut in there and away from Irina, which was fine with, really, her since that’s where she always hung out anyway.

It wasn’t until the pandemic when I began to work from home that they finally became friends. And it was mainly Irina’s doing. I opened the door to “Katusha’s room” and let Irina go in with me. She kept trying and trying to break the ice with Katusha, just by touching noses. With Irina in the room whenever I was, Katusha eventually realized that I wasn’t going to let Irina hurt her. Irina didn’t want to anyway. She was just big and scary-looking.

I was so happy when Katusha finally let Irina get close to her.

Katusha slowly began not to be scared. She’d walk around the house and climb into her cat tree even when Irina tried to climb in after her. I’d originally kept Irina crated at night and spend the night with Katusha alone. But when I was home all the time I began to let Irina sleep with us as well. At first Katusha would sleep in the cupboard in the bathroom. But soon she began to come out and sleep with us at night, cuddling with me, while I read to her, even while Irina slept feet away, at the foot of the bed.

The thing was, I think Katusha was feeling sick for a while and it just wasn’t noticeable to me. I think she wanted and needed my attention and she realized the only way she would be able to get it was to befriend the coyote-looking dog. It was literally only days after the above picture was taken that she stopped eating and drinking and I rushed her to the vet. I was so happy they were all getting along and we were all happy and at peace with each other. I do think it was genuine, I just think I forced the peace-making on Katusha and she may not have been truly comfortable for a large part of that time.

When I found out about her cancer it was already advanced. The vet said we could still try chemotherapy. I was hesitant after Rhea’s horrible experience with radiation, and her cancer wasn’t nearly as advanced as Katusha’s. So we tried palliative care. The steroids initially worked wonders and I began to seriously consider chemo. But those wonders were sadly short-lived. After one week she wasn’t eating and drinking again. The vet told me to increase her steroids and pain-killers but Katusha hated me giving her medication and she fought me every time. She started trying to hide from us. She began hissing at Irina and Sofia again when they tried to play with her, which I understood of course since she was feeling so horribly. But it still totally broke my heart.

I separated her from the dogs again and crated them at night, sleeping alone with her. But she often stayed in the cupboard and I had to reach inside and pull her out at night to put her on the bed with me. She purred a little, but it became less and less. I kept increasing the meds until all she did was sleep. The night I had her euthanized at the ER she was so out of it I honestly thought she was going to die of an overdose anyway. Keeping her alive just so I could feel her soft fur against my skin, so I could hold her and make myself believe the steroids would work again, and try hard as I could to wish the pre-sick Katusha back, just became so obviously wrong.

I still feel badly that I didn’t try the chemo even though the ER vet told me her cancer was advanced and it likely wouldn’t keep her alive for long. Cats don’t know they’re being kept alive for so and so much time; they just know they feel unwell and they’re unhappy. I know I did the right thing but I still wonder what if I’d done the chemo. She’d probably still be here. Even after my experience with Rhea, I’m not sure I’m the kind of person who can’t do everything I possibly can to save an animal.

Looking back, I think Katusha made herself get along with the dogs for my sake. First Sofia in LA then Irina in Arizona. She wanted me to be happy and she knew I would be if only they would all get along. I will forever cherish her for doing that for me.

And I’m not so sure she’s really gone. I feel her spirit around the house the same way I still feel Rhea’s. I know the dogs do as well.

Here she is in her cat tree looking outside at us in the backyard. When we’re out back, I often still feel her inside looking out at us.

A month after her death and Irina still sniffs and looks intently at the cupboard, waiting for her to come out.

I’ve been working on a new cozy mystery series, set in a cat cafe and adjoining dog bar with animal sleuths and ghosts. Rhea is the basis for the character of the main ghost, and the cat character who heads the cafe is based on my dear Najma, the cat I had back in New York. Katusha passed away after I finished the penultimate draft but I managed to write in a recurring role for her. So my beloved animals never really die. They live on in my writing and in the spirit energy with which they continue to fill our lives.

This post is cross-posted at MyCatJeoffryBooks and is about the rescue dog I adopted last year. Since there are so many dog and cat lovers out there – and since my next series will be set in a cat cafe and dog bar

Hey Everyone!

Just letting you know TREMOR, the next installment in the Infectious Rhythm Ballroom Romance series, is now out! This one focuses on Arabelle, whom readers of the other books in the series will recognize as Sasha’s former dance partner, and a theater dancer she meets in Las Vegas, Jett.

Here is the back cover description:

After losing her husband and dance partner to a motorcycle accident, ballroom showdance champion Arabelle has developed a hand tremor, making it impossible to perform the beautiful balletic feats she is known for. In her devastation, she’s lost her love of dance anyway. But when she meets Jett, a theatrical dancer specializing in daredevil aerial stunts, Arabelle feels a double tremor – one producing trepidation, the other pulsing excitement, as he evokes the bad boy ways of her husband that had so enthralled her but had also resulted in his tragedy. Can Jett help Arabelle overcome the pain of her loss, cure her trembling body, and reinvigorate her passion for dance and life? And can Arabelle tame Jett’s reckless ways before they result in his own misfortune?

I’ve put this one in the Kindle Unlimited program, so if you’re a member, you can read it for free! Otherwise, it’s $2.99, as are the others in the series.

Happy reading, everyone

Cross–posted here.

Rhea passed away from her cancer November 29, almost a month ago now, and I’ve been quite heartbroken. She moved cross-country with me, and lived with me in five different apartments, and finally a house. She’d been with me through a tumultuous time in my life.

I adopted her from the ASPCA in New York in March, 2011. I’d been unemployed for nearly two years during the recession, and within a week of adopting her, I got my first post-recession job. Cats had always been good luck for me. The day I adopted my first cat in adulthood, Najma, I found out I’d passed the New Jersey bar exam, the first bar I took. The ASPCA told me Rhea was rescued from a hoarder, who had upwards of 70 cats! I hope that was in upstate somewhere and not in a New York City apartment. Anyway, the second I saw her in the shelter I knew she was the cat for me, the way she made eye contact immediately, and purred when I touched her. But it was clear she wasn’t used to people. She hid immediately when I got her home and didn’t come out from under the futon for nearly a week. I felt badly when I had to go back to work right after bringing her home, but I think nothing could have suited her better than to have a whole apartment all to herself.

She really loved our upper west side apartment. And so she should: it was a veritable cat gymnasium. She’d fly up the stairs to the bedroom loft, run to the corner, and jump onto the fireplace mantle. She loved sitting on that mantle and peeking out between the bars of the loft.

But when my lease renewed in October that year, I was tired of New York – all the noise, the lack of space, the lack of money – and decided to try Los Angeles.

Rhea was the best traveler ever. Especially for a cat. We flew from New York to Phoenix, without a peep out of her. Once we landed and I sat her carrier atop my suitcase, I peeked in to see her looking about in wonder, taking everything in. “This is the absolutely coolest experience ever,” she seemed to say.

In Phoenix, where I’m from, my cousin helped me buy a car – my first, having lived in New York City for the past 18 years, basically since becoming an adult. We drove to Los Angeles, with, again, not a peep out of Rhea. It turns out, she loved car rides and plane rides – it meant we were going off on an adventure!

We found an apartment in L.A. but it wouldn’t be ready for another two weeks, so we stayed with a variety of friends and relatives, and then lived for a week in a pet-friendly motel in west Phoenix.

We lived in Burbank for a year before relocating to fabulous West Hollywood, where we had a living room with a huge balcony and a bedroom with a splendid floor-to-ceiling window. “My cat’s going to love this place!” I exclaimed to the landlord, upon seeing it. He shot me a bemused look and said, “Sure.” Yes, I’m the crazy lady who thinks of her animals first. Well, I knew I’d love it there too, of course.

And, yes, when we later moved to Arizona, I chose my first house based on what I knew Rhea would like 

I posted this originally on my new My Cat Jeoffry blog, here, and here, but decided to cross-post here as well.

My cat, Rhea, recently underwent stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS). I thought I’d write a post about it since, after the oncology vet recommended it, we tried to research it online but found very little. Especially about SRS and cats.

SRS is a new kind of radiation therapy – well, new to use for animals; it’s been used for humans for some time. Instead of traditional radiation, which isn’t as effective, and can take many multiple treatments, SRS can be administered as little as once, or up to a few times. And, because the vet takes a CT scan of the tumor beforehand, it’s delivered very precisely to the tumor. This means that there’s little chance of the radiation affecting any healthy, non-cancerous tissues. And, every time the animal is given a dose of radiation, s/he has to be anesthetized, which is always risky and can result in complications. So, the fewer treatments an animal has to have, the better.

Of course SRS is costly. Luckily, I had pet insurance that footed a big chunk of the bill. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

Rhea developed a tumor or the right side of her head, which grew very quickly. Above is a photo taken shortly after I first noticed it. I thought our dog, Sofia, had just played with her a bit too rough and she had an abscess. I took her to my regular vet who said it wasn’t an infection. She did some tests and it came back positive for cancer. So she referred me to a veterinary oncologist.

By the time I was able to get her in to see the oncologist – about three weeks later – it had grown substantially. It also seemed to be affecting her eyes. He did a full CT scan from her head to her chest and found that, thankfully, it hadn’t spread into her body; it was a sarcoma that was only above the bone on top of her head. The reason her eyes were affected was that it was growing so fast it was pulling the skin back, so she couldn’t close her eyes. This would mean I’d have to give her lots of eye drops, to keep her eyes moist. Anyway, the fact that the tumor was only on the top of her head made it ideal for SRS treatment.

The vet told me she would likely lose some hair on her head and when it grew back, it may be white. He also said some of the skin on the affected area could die. But the tumor was inoperable due to its size and location, and this was our only chance for her to have a full life (Rhea is 10 years old). Chemotherapy didn’t make any sense since it wasn’t metastasizing.

I was really scared! I was so afraid she was going to be in pain. I had several friends and family members who couldn’t eat for a long time after radiation because it burnt their mouths so. But both my regular and specialist vet said animals didn’t experience pain with radiation like humans often did. My regular vet said that’s the course of action she would definitely pursue if it were her pet. But I still worried. One of my friends referred me to a holistic vet and another to an animal communicator. I would have tried both if I had more money and time, but the tumor was getting bigger so quickly, I had no experience with animal communicators and had no idea what to expect and whether to trust one, they weren’t cheap, and my pet insurance plan pre-authorized my claims. So, I just went with it and trusted my oncology and regular vets’ opinions. And I prayed I wasn’t putting my cat through horrible pain.

So, Rhea had three days of SRS. I kept her at the hospital throughout because I felt like it was going to be traumatic to have to keep taking her there and back. So, I packed a little bag of food and treats and her eye medication. The man who administered the radiation called me every day with updates on how she did – which was well! When I picked her up, they gave her the little certificate below, signed by all the techs and the radiation administerer, along with the cute cape!

Everyone at AZ Veterinary Oncology was so wonderful, so supportive. I really appreciated all of their help, and that little certificate made me ridiculously happy!

When I got Rhea home, she seemed perfectly fine. She didn’t seem to be in pain at all. She went straight to her food bowl and feasted to her heart’s content, rubbed up against Sofia, then trotted upstairs and jumped from the balcony onto the top of the bookcase, always her favorite perch 

Just letting everyone know I changed the name of the cat cafe / bookstore I long to open from WITTY KITTY to MY CAT JEOFFRY BOOKSTORE AND CAT LOUNGE. You can find it here. If you’re an avid reader and an animal lover or if you’re interested in adoptable kitties, please follow us!

Right now, it’s pretty much a blog where I write mainly about books for animal lovers and post links to local pets up for adoption. I sometimes blog about great vegan food or personal stuff involving my own wonderful rescue kids