First I want to thank everyone for their postings. It’s comforting to see what others have gone though and will help us through the next couple months (and hopefully years). Here’s our situation:
In April, our dog, Nevada, started limping. After a couple days of not getting better, we brought her in. The vet’s guess was a torn ACL. They took some blood and X-rays and found a section of her bone had “something” wrong. The X-rays were sent to a radiologist for his input. Both he and our vet came to the conclusion it was osteosarcoma. They explained the outlook and our options. Of course we were heartbroken, she’s such a sweet dog, doesn’t seem fair. We made a group appointment with the local vet who handles pets with cancer and chemo. He states he’s not confident it’s cancer. He says she’s not following the normal cancer path. The next day we got the call that her blood came back positive for Blastomycosis. Other than the outrageous cost of the medication she’d need for 9 months, she should be fine. We were thrilled this was all it was. Come June, the leg is getting worse. They have us come back in to get more x-rays. The damaged area has gotten worse and the outer coating of the bone is severely inflamed. We get more pain pills. Come July and we’re no better, they do more X-rays to find it’s still gotten worse. They ran more blood and found her Blasto came back negative, so something else is now the cause of her pain. One vet thinks we’re still looking at cancer, the other one doesn’t think it is. All records were sent to a specialist who came back with an “I don’t know” response. His only conclusive response was that he doesn’t think it’s due to an injury, it’s some sort of disease or infection or something causing it. One vet states if it was her dog, she’d amputate. The other vet would do the biopsy. They both say there isn’t a “wrong” answer with where to go as we don’t really know the problem. Right now the surgery room is set up to amputate on Thursday. We talked over the weekend and kind of came to an agreement. We’re likely going to amputate. It’s so hard to know if it’s right to do, but I’m tired of her being in pain. It’s been about 4 months now where we’ve had to limit her activity, can’t let her play with our other dog, etc. I took her for a 2 block walk yesterday and it made it worse again. I’m pretty much against the biopsy as if we find out it’s cancer, we still need to amputate and she’d have to go through 2 painful surgeries. If we don’t have a cancer result, we’re likely stuck where we are with not knowing what it is, if it will ever go away, or even get better. Plus the biopsy could weaken the already damaged bone and force us to later amputate anyway.
So that’s where we are right now. Neither my husband nor I are confident we’re doing the right thing, but I guess we have to do something, so we’re going for it. Thanks for listening (reading)!
