Well, sadly my cat was terminally ill (cancer) and the 10k surgery in question was just going to be an attempt at removing the growth, but frankly it seemed like it wasn’t in his best interests, and the cost was prohibitive anyway. They did offer chemotherapy drugs at a whopping 8k or so - also too expensive. And at the best either option was just buying him time at the expense of quality of life. So in the end I concluded palliative care was the best option…

That said, I was a bit annoyed at how they went about getting the diagnosis. For example, they could have taken biopsy samples at the time of ultrasound when he was already sedated, but for some reason it was done separately. So that resulted in my cat needing sedation twice (he was not really in the best state to be sedated and pumped full of drugs all the time), and it just wound up costing more.

But idk. The whole experience sucked for obvious reasons, and I spent about 5k all up on his diagnosis/palliative care/cremation. I sorta felt let down by the whole thing, and that each vet was eager to take their cut while I was just trying to take care of a sick animal.