Recent pictures of the Hun

It's been a pretty miserable weekend.

Looks like her tumor is indeed "larger in some places" according to the vet. We're doing a long course of hellishly strong antibiotics to help with the sinus infection, swelling and resulting inflammation. They haven't really started working yet. She's acting just fine, playing and prancing and wanting to go with and bogarting the bed. I, however, have been dissolving into tears every 45 minutes or so all week. Every time she makes a stuff-ed up breathing noise I go right back to that awful month where none of us slept and I was sure she was going to die at any moment. I'm leaving in about 20 minutes to go get boyfriend (who's coming home from NY, and who's plane should have landed an hour ago) and I'm glad I get to take Hun with me.

I know we got more than an extra year from the radiation. She should have died in February 2008 and its March 30 2009. And I am happy. I am grateful and humbled and I know we made the best use of that time. But I wanted to be one of those people who are still coming back to the vet for the 'every-3-months-chest-x-ray' 7 years after radiation.

Honding my breath

The vet gave Honey antibiotics after our last visit, she has having some nose drainage issues. she finished the course on Thursday or Friday and by last night was draining again. We've scheduled a CT scan for tomorrow, to "check the status" of the tumor. Apparently it could be growing again. For that they do aplliative radiation, which is 5 courses instead of the 30 she had before. Hopefully we'll know tomorrow evening. About the same time the Boyfriend's plane departs for NY for the week.

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.

Ding Dong the Dog is Fed

This is just an FYI - through many many nights of trial and error we finally found some things Honey will eat dispite the pain in her mouth. I'm listing them in case anyone else is going through this and needs ideas. I realize we're in a unique situation regarding her food alelrgies, but I got into a conversation with a woman whose dog had IBS and was going through radiation, and we were able to swap some ideas, so hopefully this will help someone:

• Kraft singles (american, extra calcium, good for smuggling pills)
• Saifun / rice noodles (made of mung beans or rice, clear, in the asian food section) smothered in butter
• Lamb babyfood
• Rice baby cereal (its a good medium for mixing in other babyfoods as well)
• Assorted vegetable babyfoods
• Prunes (as the pain got worse, switched to prune baby food)
• Sweet potato
• Potato skin cut into strips and smothered in butter
• Yogurt
• Ice cream / pinkberry (plain or vanilla, no toppings, NO CITRUS)
• Raw spinach (washed very well)
• Canned salmon (lowest salt possible, in oil)
• EGGS!!! an omlete or scrambled egg 'piece' is also really good for smuggling pills. I usually add other stuff to the egg, like some baby food or salmon and finely chopped spinach or other veggies. It also helps to add about a tablespoon of milk per egg when you scramble them, it makes them fluffier.

And because we think the spoon hurts her mouth now, we're hand feeding her. I think this also helps because she likes to lick us so much anyways that it's just a bonus that we happen to be covered in lamb and rice. And we're telling her how good she is the entire time.

Honey's sick, I'm an Idiot.

So Honey has had some issues with her nose for a while, since we boarded her when we went to Florida for Christmas. She went through 2 courses of Clavamox and they didn't fix it, so the vet sent us to get a CT scan, which was done Monday, and they discovered a "mass" in her sinuses, which went through her hard palate. Aside from being completely beside myself because my baby is sick, I'm also having trouble handling the fact that I have to wait for a diagnosis, because that not only keeps me from doing research and figuring out what can be done, it also means that all the research I do is really broad and I keep reading these horrible doomsday predictions and the fact that they were written in 2000, and even though logically I know there is newer better information, and treatment of these HAS to have been improved in the last 8 years, I can't stop myself from imagining the worst scenario possible.

she's having trouble breathing through her nose, as the tumor (or 'mass', whatever) is taking up a lot room, and naturally the area is all pissed off and therefore inflamed and there's a secondary infection. So although she can breathe completely fine through her mouth, she won't, and there's a constant noise of her inhaling, sometimes punctuated by gasps when she is really low on air. She can't sleep because every time she begins to drift off, she remembers she can't breathe and jerks her head up and starts over. Thankfully, we have some more antibiotics, and hopefully that will help her clear an air passage. The vet said there is no way she will pass out from lack of oxygen and suffocate, and Cameron keeps assuring me that her body will take over and if she needs to, she WILL, in fact, open her mouth to breathe, but she sounds awful.

Monday she had a CT scan (and the best vet in the world - http://www.asecvets.com/) and had to stay in their ICU overnight, not because she was really in need of it, but she has never been under general anesthesia, and she had a little bleeding from the biopsies they took. Tuesday we picked her up and brought her home and she was pissed off and sick. General didn't make her feel good and she was groggy but couldn't sleep because of the breathing. Awful. Cameron had a workshop at 7:30 and I went home around 5, so she was never alone, but I screwed up royally; I decided to let her dictate what we did all evening, which to me sounds like a nice thing, but I think it freaked her out that I was getting her to decide which way we walked when I opened the door, and where we sat, etc. she has the pack ranks instilled in her so deeply, I think it was like I was asking her to lead, and while she was sick. Terrible idea and it never dawned on me. I also gave her a pain pill, which I guess she had when she was spayed, but not since, and she wigged out – racing around the house and she actually HOWLED, I’ve never heard her do that before. I seriously considered either having a nervous breakdown or taking her to the emergency vet, but she chilled out. I called the vet and they said some dogs just can’t handle opiates and she may be one of them, I swear I almost told her it was probably inherited because I’m the same way. I’m sure they already think I’m insane.

so I’ve been thinking about it, and I need something to do because I don’t care about John and Kate's plus 8, or who got arrested on Hermosa beach, and that kind of low-involvement crap makes me stress out about her more, as I’m basically just staring at the TV waiting for the next 'inhale' noise. Great, now I’m feeling guilty for doing that to her last night. That’s it; I’m printing knitting instructions off the internet and learning lace tonight.

Her appointment with the oncologist / radiologist (one of 16 board certified in the US – in the Hills, of course, - http://www.cityofangelsvets.com/) is Thursday afternoon, and I really have my fingers crossed her biopsies will be back by then because I doubt we can get another appointment before next week and I cannot sit through another weekend like last one, I’ll lose my damn mind.

I would go into the millions of possibilities about her tumor, but there are literally millions. I do know that it’s probably a malignancy, because it went through the bone of her hard palate, and I know that nasal tumors in dogs aren’t uncommon. I swear, if they had told me that years ago I would have added it to the list of stuff I worried about daily and maybe this wouldn’t have snuck up on us. I hope we got in time to do something – it’s apparently not in her lungs and not in her lymph nodes, so maybe there’s still hope.