Not the Post I Had Planned....

I try not to make non-running or non-Disney posts, but tonight's different, and this is not going to be the post I had planned.  Last night I was so excited about registration for the 2012 WDW Marathon Weekend opening today that I pre-wrote tonight's post - in which I expounded on the excitement of registering for yet another Disney race.

However, life, as usual, didn't go as expected.  Meet my older cat, Sophie:

Sophie has lost an awful lot of weight recently.  She'd had a bout of sickness a few weeks ago, but seemed to have recovered.  Then the dramatic weight loss started - and reached the point where it couldn't be ignored (not that I was ignoring it - I was very aware of it, just in denial, I think).  So I made a vet appointment for her.  As we sat in the examination room this morning, it finally hit me just how sick she could be, and I lost it - bring on the tears!  The vet couldn't have been better - she explained that she'd felt a mass in Sophie's stomach and wanted to take x-rays and do some bloodwork.  The x-rays showed a tumor in her g.i. tract...meaning that the only option is surgery.  However, surgery at her age, and in her condition, only has about a 40% survival rate, will likely be very painful, and probably won't completely fix the problem.  Wow.  Talk about a blow.

We're waiting for the bloodwork results to come back tomorrow before seriously discussing our options and where to go from here, but I'm afraid that the bottom line is that I'm going to lose my "Sophie-cat" (as I sometimes call her) waaaaay sooner than I ever thought.  I adopted Sophie as a kitten the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, and she'll be 11 in April.  She has been through so much with me, including multiple moves throughout college for co-op assignments, traipsing halfway across the country when we moved to Florida, adopting our other cat, Emma, eventually moving back to Texas, and finally moving into our current house.  She supports my running (sits on her shelf and watches me on the treadmill), and even got into the Disney spirit for me one Halloween:

It has been a really rough day.  I was supposed to run 5 miles tonight, but all I wanted to do was come home and cuddle with Sophie - so I did - no miles.  I'll post what was supposed to be today's "super-excited about registering for Disney" post tomorrow, but for tonight, I'm just sad and want to go to bed, with Sophie close by.