Piggy Hun

I’m going to start calling Honey 'piggy' because she snorts when she breathes now. I was up all night again holding her lip up (see lovely image) so she can breathe through her mouth, which is something she won’t do on her own. So unless she’s playing, and therefore panting, or lying on her side next to me while I prop her lip up and try not to move and wake her up, she still tries to breathe through her nose, which is completely occluded and therefore impossible. Poor baby. She also really (really) likes it when I rub her nose / face / neck, so I’ve been doing that a lot. Fortunately, we have a cable subscription that includes like 10 movie channels, so I was watching movies (Father of the Bride parts 1 and 2, Anastasia, Harry Potter 4, and Robin Hood Men in Tights) all night instead of infomercials on Lifetime. Cameron had the morning off so I went to the grocery store and I’m planning on making chili and then banana bread. I wanted Cameron to take a loaf of it to the oncologist with Honey tomorrow, but I’m thinking maybe I should send something prepackaged instead? When I worked in the public library insane people used to bake things and bring them to us, and we always threw them away (I know that sounds awful, but they also brought us dead seagulls and used hypodermic needles, so it really wasn't overly dramatic). I remember this one guy brought me fried chicken. Absurd. Anyways, on our first visit to the cancer ver I told them that she had a low tolerance to pain meds that “she must have inherited from me” and produced a chronologically-organized folder of all her medical records, including receipts, from the papers I signed at the pound when I was adopting her to the most recent, and had a corresponding notebook I had my questions for the vet outlined in, and took notes in while we talked (in different colored ink, so I could track who said what) so I’m fairly sure they already think I’m a wacko, but hopefully if I send baked goods they won’t think I’m a loon / crazed killer, because tomorrow is the 8th anniversary of the day I adopted Honey, and I’m encouraged that she’ll be starting treatment on that date. Also, I have a really kickass recipe for banana bread, and I'm grateful that those people do what they do, because without them she would have no chance.



On another note, I’m compiling some of the sources I used while I was researching canine chondrosarcoma. Most of the stuff I could find online was really old, from around 2000 or 2001, and the oncologist didn’t have any journal articles or current research on hand. It doesn’t help that my passwords from college to their knowledge base have expired and I can’t log in and search there. Here are a few of the REPUTABLE sources I have found:

The Merck Veterinary Manual:
http://www.merckvetmanual.com/mvm/index.jsp
standard book for vets, searchable online and current.

Entrez Pubmed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/
Pubmed was developed by the National Library of Medicine as a free resource for doctors worldwide, and the standard language is English. It’s pretty clunky to search, especially if you haven’t had exposure to it before, but it frequently includes research into canine and other animal conditions as well as those of humans. I once found a study of the long term effects of woman aged 18 – 24 who took Maxalt, a migraine medicine I had just been prescribed. It was great.

Chondrosarcoma Support Group:
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Chondrosarcoma/


Remember, if you’re searching for medical information to not look just that the date at the bottom on the webpage, that reflects the update date, not necessarily the age of the information. The first article found on Google about Chondrosarcoma in dogs was from 2000, and terribly outdated. Also, Chondrosarcoma is good for comparative medicine, as it has many of the same characteristics in different species.