Jumping to end for a quick update. Byron is home. He's in a lot of pain and has a massive wound stitched up on his leg (it's got to be at least 5 inches long), but at least he's eating. They did their best to get clean margins, which meant that they had to go a little bit into one of the muscles, poor kitty. As I said earlier, the vet says we won't know how dangerous the tumor is until Friday. He does not seem to be optimistic that this is a benign tumor, which is odd since he says that type of cancer is extremely rare. But. Yeah. I'm trying to think positive.
Byron has antibiotics for the next week, but no official painkillers. The vet says that I can give him a baby aspirin tomorrow morning, but I hate that I have to leave him when he's feeling so obviously miserable. Total cost of all tests, appointments, surgery, and dental cleaning: $1000+. Ouch.
And to add to the financial debacle, I ended up buying a new laptop today after the Genius Bar guy told me that my old one was DOA. He was willing to send it out to attempt to salvage something, but it was going to cost more than $500 just to make the attempt. I opted to put that money towards a new machine instead. I am very proud of myself, though. With some help from a step-by-step website ND linked me to, I managed to disassemble the old one, extract the old hard drive, install it in the enclosure, and transfer all the data to the new machine! I'm feeling vaguely tech-goddessy for that.
I'm not going to say how much I charged for the laptop. Let's just say that the credit card I had just emptied my savings to pay off is no longer (remotely) paid off.
Sigh. March. Yeah. Time to go away.