Cancer unexpectedly took Lucy before old age could finish her

By David McElroy · November 2, 2025

In the end, it was cancer that took Lucy from me.

I don’t want to talk about this, but I can’t help but tell the story. I can’t speak the words without breaking down, so I’ve told nobody so far. I’ve already given you the big picture view of losing her very early this morning, but here’s how the last day of her precious life really went.

I had known for months that Lucy was declining, so I’d been preparing myself. She didn’t have any symptoms of anything wrong out of the ordinary, but I’ve been through enough death with dogs and cats to recognize when the end is approaching.

Each time I returned home from work this past week, I feared that I would find her dead. I had the same fears about her each morning when I woke up. I knew it was that close. I knew it was inevitable.

I was surprised when she made it to another weekend, but I was overjoyed to have a little more time with her. When Saturday started, though, I had no idea how much would change by the time my long day would end Sunday morning.

Lucy still wanted to be near wherever I was in the house Saturday. She was dragging herself to whichever room I would go. I was able to get a few last photos of her, including one with her trademark “smile.” Mostly, though, I talked to her, because listening to me tell her what a wonderful girl she was always made her tail wag. It seemed to make her happy.

She had stopped eating last weekend, but I had continued to offer food to her each day. She had shown no interest all week.

Around 3:30 p.m., something seemingly miraculous happened. She wanted to eat. I gave her a 5.5-ounce can of food and she gobbled it down. I gave her another and she quickly ate it. She was enjoying herself.

I was afraid that she shouldn’t have too much — since she hadn’t eaten for a week — so I waited about an hour between giving her more. She was eating each bit of food like a hungry girl who was just discovering food.

But something changed about 10:30 p.m.

When I gave her the sixth can of food I had offered to her, she not only struggled to stand to eat it — but she yelped in pain. Something was causing intense pain for her, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

By this point, I had allowed myself to have some hope that she might be getting better and that she might even get back to normal for awhile. But when I heard her cries of pain, I knew I had to get immediate help.

Her two front legs looked swollen. One of her legs even seemed to bend at an odd angle near her paw. Could she have hurt herself somehow and this was the cause of the pain? That was the best narrative I could come up with.

I had planned to take her to my regular vet Monday if she was still alive, but the pain had changed everything. We couldn’t wait. It was time for a trip to an emergency vet clinic.

I carried her to the car and gently placed her into the back seat on a towel. As we drove, I talked to her the entire way. She has always loved riding in cars, but she wasn’t accustomed to this sort of ride.

By the time we arrived at the emergency clinic, I had trouble talking to the person at the front desk. I was too emotional. I was full of fear of losing her and hope that we might still save her. So I struggled to talk as I struggled to control my tears.

When the clinic brought a stretcher out for her, I lifted her from the back seat to move her onto the stretcher. She gave a little yelp of pain. As I lifted her, I felt something on her underside that I hadn’t felt before. It was a hard mass inside her body — one that shouldn’t be there. She had lost enough weight that something that had been hidden was obvious. I hadn’t been looking for it. My hand just happened to touch that spot.

The wait was excruciating while the vet examined Lucy. When the vet finally came to talk to me, she looked somber. I thought I knew where this conversation was headed.

The vet admitted that she thought it was cancer, but she said the only way to be sure was to do a biopsy. Even without that, though, blood work and X-rays could tell us with a high degree of confidence. She said that given Lucy’s age and condition, we could give up now or we could do the blood work and X-rays.

I told the vet that she was probably right, but that if I didn’t have the tests done, I would never be able to be sure I had tried everything. She understood and the plan was set. If the tests showed what we feared, it would be time to let her go. If there was any doubt, she would give me pain medication and I would go to my regular vet on Monday for another opinion.

It was well after midnight when the vet returned with the test results. Her white blood cell count was off the chart — literally. The vet said that an elevated white blood cell count could normally indicate an infection, but it was high enough in this case that it was pretty much always an expression of the body’s effort to fight cancer.

Then we talked about the X-rays.

The upper part of her backbone was normal and the lower part was normal, too. The middle section, though, looked “as if moths had been eating on it,” in her words. And this was a death sentence all by itself.

The vet believes that the main abnormal mass was from her mammary glands, meaning that we could call it breast cancer in a human. She believes that the cancer was metastasizing to other parts of her body — including some bones.

The cancer had apparently attacked her backbone already. There was also another mass on the upper part of one of her front legs. The vet said the backbone was now very brittle and could break at any time.

It would have been completely irresponsible to bring her home and take any more chances with her at this point. I had to let my beautiful girl go.

The vet said I didn’t have to stay for the end, but I couldn’t imagine bringing Lucy this far and then abandoning her just before the finish line. I had to stay with her.

I was rubbing her head and talking to her at the very end. I was telling her everything was OK and she was going to go to sleep now. I told her how much I loved her and I thanked her for being such a good girl. She was listening to my voice as I talked — and her tail was gently wagging against the stretcher as she took her last breaths.

I went to the parking lot and sat in my car. I broke down and cried hard.

When I stopped crying, I opened my MacBook and wrote a brief article about her death. I published that and shared it to Facebook and Instagram.

Then I drove home in silence — to a house that already felt empty without Lucy waiting for me at the front door.

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Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

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