June 18th - 4 months out of radiation and happy as a dog wiht her own couch...

I seriously can’t believe it’s been over a month since I posted here. I guess it was easier at first, when she was feeling different every day, but now it’s just like we have the Hun back, except maybe a little more playful. I keep thinking that maybe she knows she’s got cancer and is living with a little more energy than before, but whenever I share this idea with other people, they tend to tell me that she was probably feeling a little sickly before we noticed something was wrong.

Quick recap in case you’ve just joined us: my guy and I boarded Honey when we went to FL for xmas/Hanukkah. When we dropped her off, she was fine. When we picked her up, she was so sick. We did two rounds of antibiotics and then the vet found a lump in her hard palate. It was a tumor, and we did a month of radiation, then two weeks of the worst side effects ever. I go back and forth between kicking myself for boarding her, and being glad we did because she would have probably had a much more advanced cancer if she hadn’t developed the secondary infection which initially led us to the vet.

Anyways, Honey’s beyond spoiled. The longest period of time she’s been alone since January this year is about 4 hours. She’s also sleeping on her own bed again and best of all, SHE CAN BREATHE OUT OF HER NOSE so I can sleep. It’s fantastic. Last weekend her Zadie was here for father’s day and she played fetch with him for about 3 days straight, and insisted on sleeping on the air mattress with him instead of on her couch (yes, HER couch. A neighbor moved out and gave it to us, and it’s exactly honey-sized). The only lingering problem we seem to be having is her eye – her left eye was in the beam of the radiation and the tear duct is permanently destroyed. We give her cyclosporine eye drops daily, and they’re actually bringing back her ability to produce tears, but it probably won’t ever be 100%. She’s also learned that the eye drops feel good so it’s supereasy to give them to her. Other than that, the radiation side effects cleared up, and although it took almost 3 months out from the last treatment to get there, she can breathe normally again. She’s also gaining back the weight she lost, and we’re actually at the point now where we can’t see her ribs any more. I think that might have had something to do with all those slices of muenster she’s getting as treats…. She’s also got ALL her face hair back, and it’s about half white half brown. We were assured that if it came back at all it would be all white, so I’m taking the salt-and-pepper effect to be a good thing.

And since she was diagnosed in January, and given 2 months, she would have died 3 months ago. Instead, today I get to go home and play fetch and cuddle with her while we lay around like slobs and watch Deadliest Catch.

CATCH!

Honey played catch today - and actually hopped up on her hind feet and snagged the orange ball out of the air. She's also ploughing through her third can of dogfood of the day. Her nose is almost free of scabs, and has been passing out licks like there's no tomorrow. we're down to 1 3/4 pain pills per dose, from 2 1/2. We're going to need to step her prednisone down soon and I hope she keeps her appetite. The pics are from her walk earlier today (top) and from last night (bottom), when she played with that ball for the first time in a MONTH - I cried. Now there's a post - dinner headroll happening on the floor that I need to go be a part of.

HOLY CRAP!!! we have bedding rearandgement, chuck it ball playadge and litckatude.

Today was really amazing - We went to Larchmont this morning and took Honey, had sushi (which Honey loved) and then home - Cameron had to work and Nancy and Tybee and I stayed home, sitting in bed, watching Ab Fab while Honey napped. Tybee went to a show with a friend who lives here, and Nancy and I took Hon for a long walk (like 10 blocks) where she investigated lots o yards and peed on everything. I noticed something about half way through our walk, she was SNIFFING things - like her nose was moving and her lungs were moving in tandem to the sniffage. I was SO PSYCHED. So we let her sniff everything she wanted, because hell, it's been two months since she could smell anything - and after our walk we fed her a can of dog food (2nd for the day) and took her on a car ride to Home Depot and then Ralphs.

After Ralphs, we came home and Honey decided it was high time she was played with - with her CHUCK IT BALL (really hard rubber ball that she can't destroy) and she spent two hours shoving her ball on everyone asking for the fetchatude. Her face looks better than it did yesterday, hell, it looks better than it did three hours ago. She ate a THIRD can of dog food and demanded more fetch, then a walk and more fetch, and she just lay down (when her daddy and grandparents left for the evening). It’s AWESOME. I've spent two months watching her get sicker, and in the past two days she's turned it all around. My baby is gonna be ok.

blue skin nosicle and a 1 week check up!

I know it’s been a while since I posted about Honey’s progress, but I’ve been hangin’ with the doggiegrandparents and Tybee. The vet said Honey was looking really good, and was indeed starting to heal. Apparently the animals get worse for about a week and then turn a corner and get batter pretty rapidly. She was starting to get pink skin around the edges of her sores, and today (it’s Sunday morning) the majority of her skin (the nosicle area that was raw and sore) is purply and pinkish and it’s feeling so much better she is letting us touch / kiss it. These are healing pictures! - Honey with Becca, her favorite lady, Honey with Nancy, the doggiegrandma, and Honey at the Grove, which is an outdoor mall, rockin' out in the shade (her nosicle is sensitive to the sun).



We’ve taken her everywhere in the last few days, the Grove, the Promenade (both outdoor malls) and a few restaurants where she had to wait in the car, but we checked on her every 10 minutes or so. It’s fantastic; everything we’ve done all weekend has been centered on ‘what can we do with Honey?’ and if we can’t bring the dog, we don’t do it. Honey’s really responding. Lots of strangers are giving her pets and she’s getting to smell lots of new and interesting things. Last night she even slept on her own bed all night. At first we were nervous, but the end result was that I got a whole night of sleep as well, and it’s awesome. First thing this morning she got up on our bed and it looked like she was breathing out of her nose, but we couldn’t be sure.

There is some bad news, though, she has a bump on the inside of her right ear that’s new (in the last week) and we’re going to need to have it biopsied. The vet couldn’t get a good sample of it with a needle so we have to have her sedated so they can get some of it to look at on a slide. It’s in a fairly easy place to get to if it needs to be removed, the inside flap of her ear, but that’s not something you want to hear.

All the bases. All of them. Every. Single. One.

Last night we took Honey to a shamanic healer and he gave her an Ayurvedic Analysis. He took some of her hair and looked at the structure; I think to determine if anything was out of balance and then infused her collar with some mantras targeted at the physical areas of her body she’s having trouble with (nose, mouth, skin, feet). I don’t totally understand how it works but Ayurveda literally translates to ‘knowledge of life’ and the goal is to help her body restore itself using mantras and specific chants, whose energy is held in her collar. We used the collar Fiona gave her for Christmas, and when I told my dad his only response was “well, you do live in LA”. I guess Honey is now truly a southern California dog.

This morning her face was really bothering her and she kept trying to paw at it. its so awful when she does that – she keeps opening it up and bleeding and there’s just no way to explain to her that she’s hurting herself more, and I don’t know that she feels it as pain or just discomfort, but evidently its not enough of a deterrent to stop her from pawing. It would be really funny is it wasn’t so sad – “honey – stop that, you’re killing yourself. Really, have a little foresight” I feel bad that we have to yell to get her to stop it, like I’m a total monster because I’m scolding a hurt dog.

Cameron took her to the vet while he went to an audition this morning, because we can’t leave her alone or she scratches at her face. He said she was feeling ok this afternoon, which makes me happy because I was afraid we were going to have to up her meds again. On a related note, I’m not posting pictures of her any more because she looks really awful – out concerns about her face are about preventing infection, and it basically looks like one massive sore. I’m sure the scar tissue is going to be significant, as her lips are already tighter where they’re raw. I promised her I wouldn’t post photos of her that I wouldn’t want posted if it was me, and I’m also a little concerned about freaking people (MY MOM) out, so if you’re wondering what bad side effects (she’s being used in the vet’s book for an ‘this is how awful it can look’ example) from radiation look like, I can email you a picture.

It's like fighting fire. With arrows (Sunday).

It took us less than 24 hours to completely destroy the apartment after I cleaned it on Saturday. There are bits of foam all over the floor from the inside of her dog bed (I'm washing the cover, and she destroyed the filler while I was downstairs – no more than 3 minutes and she annihilated a twin bed sized foam pad) and laundry everywhere. The kitchen, which I scrubbed yesterday, is now full of dishes that need to be washed, and for some reason a few of the chairs are sticky. The dog won’t sleep, won’t eat, can’t play, if we take her for a “walk” she meanders about 3 feet and stops, stares into space and will stay totally completely still until you make her move or she falls asleep. When we’re in the house, she follows me really close (less than a foot of distance, which makes it impossible to move because I might accidentally touch her), but wags her tail and smiles whenever I look at her. Earlier she acted like she wanted to eat, but it was a clever ruse, she took about two licks each of the assorted baby food flavors I bought and then walked away. I guess it’s another omelet, maybe ill add the lamb baby food or the organic peas with brown rice.

*eight minutes later*

She fell asleep leaning on me standing up in the kitchen, and her omelet is cooling now. She did drop the bone (this squeaky toy she holds in her mouth and can breathe around) and is watching me type, wagging, so maybe she’s hungry and will eat the lamb-green peas-egg concoction I just made her, but probably not. Oh well, tomorrow we start prednisone and there will be a whole other set of issues – apparently she’s going to be so hungry there’s a possibility she’ll start nibbling my fingers when I fall asleep. One can hope – she’s down around 47.5 pounds now, normal is about 51.

In other news, I’m so tired I tried to watch ‘Flushed Away’ this afternoon, and couldn’t follow the plot. That’s a whole new ring of hell – I have a degree in English lit and I couldn’t follow a G rated Disney flick. SIGH.

Saturday

 I've spent today vacuuming the apartment over and over, because Honey keeps shedding fur / skin / whatever and its really, really gross. I can't take the e-collar (the cone-looking collar) off her at all now, because she claws at her face and opens it up more. Ugh. She did eat lunch, a 2-egg omelet with spinach and salmon, which i cooled to room temperature and hand fed her, because she hadn't eaten and was NOT going to eat dog food, thank you. Tomorrow evening we start prednizone, so she will be ravenous according to the vet, and will eat whatever so i'm saving the goopy dog food i made her that she wasn't interested in. 

The pain killer dose has increased from 25mg twice a day to 100mg three times a day, and I gave her the pills at lunch (cleverly smuggled in a hunk of salmon). After she takes pills, its really interesting to watch her as they take effect.  She goes from standing and being fairly alert to falling asleep on her feet. this morning I gave her a massage, and after lunch she asked for one so while the painkiller kicked in I rubbed her and she fell asleep with me supporting her. 

Saturday night we took Honey to our friend Eric's house for an 'end of radiation' party. We took her bed and blanket, and chew toy and we played star wars monopoly and she napped on the floor next to me. She started getting uncomfortable around 12 so we took her home and had a truly terrible night - she simply cannot sleep with the collar on, and someone has to watch her constantly if it's off. I got to sleep around 6 am, when Cameron woke up.  

Graduation Day!!!

The Vet - beautiful banana trees and lots of glass. Good ole' VCG!

The radiation graduation board - Honey is front & center, in the cowboy hat and aviators.....

AWWWWWWWW my honey...

Honey and Jordan with their people.... Jordan's radiation graduation picture is between us.

The sculpture in front of the vet.

Today was Honey’s last day of radiation!! I’m so stoked I can’t even begin to explain it. Her face is looking really really rough, and will continue to get worse for a week or two, but will ‘turn a corner’ and heal. I know this is gross – but what’s happening to her is basically that a scab is forming just under her skin and flaking off, taking her skin and fur with it when it falls off. The end result is that her face is going to be skinless, raw and just really awful feeling for a week or so. The inside of her mouth is just as bad, with tissue sloughing off the inside of her lips and gums, and I can’t imagine that her sinuses are much better inside, although we can’t see them. Poor baby. She keeps trying to itch her face on anything that’s still long enough – the bed, us, the floor, and we can’t let her because we were told horror stories of dogs scraping their faces off. Her dose of the painkiller is going up again – it was one pill twice a day, and we’re up to two and a half pills three times a day, but she can sleep and (sometimes) even eat, and she can tolerate a lip prop so whatever she needs, we’ll give her.

They took her off the anti-inflammatory today, as her liver enzymes were getting really high, and in two days or so (once the anti-inflammatory gets out of her system) we’re going to start her on prednisone, so she’ll eat. Last night we gave her some fresh spinach and a fried egg, but she won’t eat her dog food outside the vet any more. We’re also allowed to use lubricants on her lip props now, except not petroleum based.

Right now she’s standing near me with her head hanging down, I’m relatively sure she’s breathing out of her nose, but she’s half asleep. Nothing is as pitiful as watching a dog fall asleep on its feet. I’m going to sit with Honey on the bed and watch some bad tv on this glorious Friday night. I'm including pictures of her last visit to the vet.

Holding my breath until tomorrow

In re: moldy orchids, apparently some types of mold are beneficial and this is one of those types. I’m not buyin’ it, and I’m repotting them stat, as all I can find is one stupid photo of mold on orchids online. You’d think a community as obsessed with plants as the orchid community would have made full use of the ability to post photos to the internet, but evidently not. I can find a description of beneficial mold which reads like this – “white fuzzy mold I see on my soil” I mean, really. What is that? Not clear at all. And crazily unhelpful. But the plants look superhealthy so I’ll wait until they stop blooming and then repot in new medium. I’m currently drying them, to help inhibit the growth of whatever it is that’s using my babies as host.

Honey did ok last night, she wouldn’t eat well and we had trouble putting lip props in and keeping them in. she also refused to take her pills and we had to shove them down her throat, which made me cry because I know it hurt her and I hate that. I coated the pills in butter, came at her mouth from the side and shoved them between her teeth on top of her tongue, then held her nose up and stroked her throat so she swallowed them. She didn’t manage to spit any back up but I did bump her gums with my nails a few times and I know I scraped some layers of skin off. It breaks my heart that she lets me do things like that to her that have to hurt but she just stands there and lets me do it. I feel like a monster. Tomorrow is her last radiation treatment, and our final consult with the vet, and then the side effects get nasty. I’m not going to post any more current pictures of her until she starts healing, because I know I sure as heck wouldn’t want anyone to see me if I was that hurt.

OMG I slept! (2 more radiatoin sessions!!!!)

Last night Honey went to sleep on her own bed for the first time in over a month. She was lying on her side with her head hanging off her bed, sort of with her nosicle pointed down towards the floor, and we stuck a lip prop in her mouth and she went to sleep, breathing well. Unfortunately we were both so freaked out because she was sleeping on the floor (is that bad? Should we worry? Should we call her?) that we didn’t get to sleep until around 1:45, to be woken up by Honey getting on the bed and laying on me at about 2:12 (by ‘on me’ I mean curled up tightly against me, with her chin and a paw on my leg or stomach. That’s her favorite) so I covered her in a throw, stuck in a lip prop and wadded a shirt up under the side of her head, as she cant breathe unless her head is tilted to the side. I woke up at 6:35 with my alarm and neither she nor I had moved. I feel like a total glutton for getting 4 hours of sleep at once. It’s awesome.

The bad news of the day is that my orchids have MOLD in their potting matrix. I have no idea what to do about this – I looked some stuff up online and it says to repot them as soon as they’re done blooming. Shoot, I have no idea how long that will be, as they both just bloomed, and won’t they die in the mean time? it also said to “wash their roots to insure no mold spores remain” apparently these people think mold spores are about the size of small pebbles, because there is no way you can “insure no mold spores remain” without soaking the roots in boiling acid. Anyone know how to fix this??

17 down, 3 to go.

And the side effects are getting worse. I think a lot of it is her reaction to the painkillers, and it seems like if she gets wound up it’s really difficult for her to chill out again. Last night she was beside herself because Cameron wasn't home, pacing and whining and howling (she’s really funny when she howls - she doesn't make noise, but throws her head back and purses her lips). I got her a really really soft chew toy, one of the kind that would normally last about 2 minutes and then have to be thrown away in pieces, and she just carried it around while whimpering and wagging her tail. I couldn’t chill her out so I lay down on the bed with her and she didn’t seem able to get comfortable, she kept climbing behind me and laying on my pillows and following me when I got up to get some water, so I finally took a nap, and she would fall asleep for about 20 minutes, then wake up and realize Cameron wasn’t home yet and start the freak out dance all over again. I think the best it’s been was the might I was cooking and she was watching me. Maybe I need to do something in the house that’s a little more active and she will be too distracted to do the daddy dance (I’m not actually buying this – just hoping in print).

I had a really bad dream last night, I'm not sure what was so freaky about it but it scared me, my mom and Honey and I had gotten off the train at the wrong stop and were waiting for it at the MacArthur Park station (not the best neighborhood) and I leaned down to pet her and she was panting. It was weird, I woke up and was completely wired and freaked out for like half an hour. There wasn’t even anything remotely scary about that. I don’t get it.

We got to a point this morning around 4 am where it seemed to hurt her to have the lip prop in her mouth, so I can’t wait for Friday when we can give her some topical pain reliever, and experiment with lip props covered in cold Vaseline or something else to make them less abrasive. Or maybe she will start to get used to the pain killers and settle down.

In other news, there’s a hawk riding an updraft outside my window (8th floor downtown L.A.) and the lovely dendrobium Cameron gave for my 27th is juuust about in full bloom. I think I need a saguaro, but then my window garden will be complete.

Side effects and Pearl Harbor Specials

I cannot believe how strong Honey is. Her face is starting to show the radiation effects, and it's not pretty. There are about three places on her face where the skin appears to be peeling off, and you can see red raw flesh. If I had one of those anywhere on my body, I doubt I would be able to do anything but cry and complain. Honey has three, one on her eyelid and she still wants to play. The skin is starting to slough off the inside if her mouth and it seems to be really painful to her to breathe with her mouth open, I guess when the tissues start to dry out they hurt. It's really difficult to put a lip prop in now, although we've switched to neoprene so it's pretty much the lightest, softest stuff we could find. I wait until she's almost asleep and then I slide it in as fast as I can and sometimes it works and she falls all the way asleep. We’ve also started running them under cold water before we use them, and I think that helps. I can't believe this is the same dog that wanted to play fetch this afternoon. It's really amazing. I can never hope to be as strong as she is. She and I spent all weekend lying around alternately eating and watching World War 2 specials on the history channel. If anyone has any questions about Pear Harbor, now would be the time to ask me.

We're anticipating pain while eating, there is already some but making her food a little waterier than baby food and spoon feeding her while telling her how good she is seems to work. She even sometimes bypasses the spoon and eats on her own, but I hold the bowl at face height and praise her anyways. I'm pretty sure she'd endure more pain if we were telling her she was good. Last night we got her frozen yogurt and she seemed to like it, she also likes her food better if it's cold.

This morning her left eye was really dry (it’s in the radiation beam) – full of gunk and the lids were folding in and rubbing against her eye. I don’t know if we’re allowed to put anything in it, we’re not allowed to put anything on the sores because lots of topical creams and drops etc. can disperse the radiation beam, and make it less effective. Cameron’s going to call when the vet gets there at 9 am, so hopefully our eyedrops will be radiation approved. In the meantime, I put a few drops of water in her eye and that seemed to help a little. I can’t believe the dog lets me put eyedrops in, she must know I’m trying to help.

I didn’t get much sleep last night (spent the night making Honey comfy, and unfortunatley she was most comfy on top of me), so I’m off to raid the coffee pot.