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April 7, 2006
Maeve the Dog Update
Had a big scare with Maeve the dog yesterday. She’s been holding her own ever since being diagnosed with lymphoma back in December, 2005. The last week or so she’s been refusing her usual food and acting a little down. Yesterday the first report from the vet was that her liver functioning was impaired suggesting that the lymphoma had spread to her liver.
She has t-cell lymphoma which does not have as good a prognosis as b-cell lymphoma (the more common type) but her immediate response to treatment was remission which usually predicts a better life expectancy (not a cure but at least buying a couple of more years).
But if the lymphoma was in her liver then it would mean that her remission was over. The formula is that the length of the first remission predicts that the length of the next remission will be half of the first remission. Any attempt at inducing remission again would only give her about another month or so.
I opted for the biopsy to determine what was going on. At the same time started preparing myself for the fact that this was it. I wasn’t inclined to put her through more chemo just to get another month. Even though I was very upset, I consoled myself with the thought that without chemo she would have died within a few weeks of diagnosis but chemo had given me a few more months.
You have to measure these things in terms of months when you’re dealing with cancer.
However, the biopsy did not reveal more lymphoma. The best guess is that one of the chemo drugs was toxic to her liver and caused damage. It could be another type of cancer but that seemed less likely. Damage to the liver is still a serious concern and could prove fatal as well. They put her on SAMe which is a holistic treatment which I thought was cool that they were open to that approach.
When I picked her up she was ready to leave, as she always is. She seemed her usual feisty self, even with the liver problems. When we got to the floor we live on she took the leash from me as she usually does and walked herself home.
Maeve has a history of surviving usually fatal events.
As a one year old she helped herself to another dog’s bottle of chewable sedatives. Her stomach was pumped but the pills were already digested. She was fine.
As a four year old, she ate a bottle of chewable pills for incontinence. 3000 mg to be exact. They didn’t expect her to make it through the night. She did. She had some complications and when we called the ASPCA Poison Control center to find out if the complications were typical, their response was that they didn’t have on record any dog surviving a 3000 mg overdose so they couldn’t tell us what would happen. She recovered. I was told to expect that there would be significant kidney damage from the overdose. There was not.
As we left the animal hospital last night, I turned to Maeve and said, “Guess you’re not going to go down without a fight are you?” Her response was to leap into the car to get back to the business of taking charge of her life.
Posted by maeve921 at April 7, 2006 12:25 PM
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