Challenges

We've have a rough week (okay, really a few weeks) at the Broken Egg household. It all started a few weeks ago when Big, our big lab mix, stopped eating her dog food. We tried canned dog food, chicken, then hamburger,then steak, even meat product baby food. She would eat each thing once or twice then stop. We went through several iterations of vet appointments, first blood work, then an aspiration of her lymph node, then surgery to remove one of her lymph nodes so they could biopsy it - that was last Wednesday.

On Monday I took her back to the vet because she had some swelling in the leg that had the lymph node removed. The swelling was normal but we got the results of the biopsy then d she has lymphoma. Not good but it was supposed to be a slow growing kind (small cell). Later that night she threw up a couple of times then acted like she need to go out. She was a bit off kilter but I didn't think too much of it until she fell all the way down the stairs (she was okay) then had some trouble getting outside. When I let her out the next day I realized that she had lost her sight completely. Another trip to the vet who said it was most likely a side effect of the lymphoma. On Wednesday we met with the oncologist, long story short we have about a 50/50 shot at remission with Chemo. She also saw the opthamologist there who gave us some other meds to try. Thursday was our first Chemo treatment and she was back at the opthamologist on Friday just to round out a full week of vet visits.

She seems to be reacting well to the Chemo, we were told that dogs react better to it than people and that seems to be the case so far. She's still blind which doesn't bode well for her ever regaining her sight, but we can deal with a blind dog as long as she's alive.... We'll be going back pretty much weekly for treatment and they'll evaluate her each time to see if it's working at all.

So, we're hanging in there the best we can - trying to make our girl feel better. She is eating again, most likely thanks to the Prednisone but we are thankful for that not so small improvement. I'm not entirely sure how we've ended up with three dogs in a row with cancer but Big's is definitely the worst we've seen (the others had tumors that were easily removed and the cancer never returned). Little is pretty good, she seems to know something is wrong but she really wants to play I think.

Thanks for any positive thoughts you can spare for Big!