wrecks

i have a dog. have i told you about my dog? he's a great dog. he's all mixed up. i call him a yellow lab/german shepard/basset hound. he's got the lab head, gs body, and legs of a basset. he's a wreck of a dog and his name is wrecks! wrecks is the happiest dog in the world. ill mannered, good natured, and always always with a smile and a warm hug/rub up against ya/ wanna jump on ya hello. i am completely in love with him.

wrecks is dead.

he's not in the ground yet, but short for this world. the end of march my wife felt a lump on his throat, much like the one he had had earlier in his life from a splinter stuck there from eating on a wood fence. i was away at work at the time. it was a saturday morn, but our normal vet decided they were to busy to see him(little side note, FUCK YOU CEDAR PARK ANIMAL CLINIC). called my mom(a vet) and she figured it would probly be ok to wait till monday since he was acting normal. n called the closer/friend recommended WHITEROCK VETERINARY HOSPITAL on monday and got in that day. dr. tod wasn't so sure it was a splinter, seems there were two lumps. but with past history and current behavior(new hole in fence) knocked wrecks out and went looking for a foreign body.

he didn't find one.

nobody thought that was good. what he didn't find led him to send some tissue samples off to a lab to look for cancer. in the mean time wrecks started antibiotics on the hopes it was something else. the most likely cause was lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells. in dogs it's a death sentence.

with out treatment life expectancy is about two months. with minimal treatment 2-4 months. go for chemo and a dog will typically get only 12-18 months. when naomi quietly(hopefully) asked me what we'd do if he had cancer, there was only one answer. BREAK OUT THE BIG GUNS AND FIGHT AS HARD AS YOU CAN AS LONG AS YOU CAN! he's my boy, and i will do whatever it takes to keep him happily with us as long as he's willing.

a couple days later i'm back home and the test results are in. NEGATIVE cancer, just inflammatory cells and what not. but now one of his legs has an enlarged lymph node as well. some other test and we press on with antibiotics and decided we'd need to see some reaction in a week, or else do another biopsy.

those days pass. no real change, accept his appetite is a little lower. we're up in denton a few days, so i have my mom do the biopsy. naomi pretty much decided it's lymphoma. i was waiting to see the test results. they come as we're leaving back to austin, april 6th, 2009.

wrecks is dead.

lots of tears on the ride home. hell, there are still plenty tears to go around. he's so fucking happy.

there are two canine oncologists in the austin area. how the hell are you supposed to pick which caner doc to see? i pick the one that can get wrecks in b4 i go to work, that's how. i had read up and had an idea of what to expect. multiweek, multidrug chemo course that waxes and wanes untill we fail. on that first visit, i walked in and said to doc brown(the oncologist) "hi, i'm tyler, this is wrecks, and we are the exception". she quickly explained to me that indeed wrecks is an exception. lymphoma is quite common in dogs, but seems he has a weird kind of caner, intermediate cell lymphoma. there are three kinds, small, intermediate, and large cell. cats get small, dogs get large, and wrecks gets intermediate. what's that tell us? not much. there isn't enough documentation out there on intermediate cell in dogs to give us a clear picture of what we can expect. anecdotally, doc brown has seen two such cases. both in remission 5 years(one more). that is FANTASTIC, but it is also maybe not what we can expect. we will see. it certainly allows plenty of room to be hopefull.

wrecks started chemo that day, april 7th. i left for work the next afternoon. by that time his lymph nodes had gotten much softer and decreased in size by 50%. it was great to see. that evening n reported that they had gone down even more.

so, we've been going through the treatment regiment. his shit and piss are poison for the 72 hours after chemo. we call him poison dog during those times. his appetite has been about half most the time. he lost 10 lbs since his first lumpy visit. he did stop eating all together after last week's treatment, but a quick anti-nausea shot and a switch to rice/chicken home cooking = a dog that will eat forever and is confused as to if we are cooking for him or us.

wrecks is happy as ever. even when he's not feeling good, or is tired, he's still miles of smiles. it makes the whole thing easier on us.

how are we gonna pay for it? beats the fuck out of me. right now it's all going on cc's and out of pocket when we have it. that cash/credit was slotted to be used in the move to denton. hopefully i can get some workover to make some extra, i HATE workover. but whatever it takes. we'll figure it out. the money stuff always seems to figure itself out. not always in the best/smartest way, but it gets paid for, whatever it is.

so that's where that is. we'll keep fighting the good fight untill wrecks tells us otherwise. two months, ten years. it'll be worth it, whatever he gets.