Here are the latest Stinky updates. I’ll start with Dru.
We decided to go ahead with Dru’s mammary tumor and tooth removal surgery. I’m glad we did because she is eating again and her appetite has greatly improved.
The biopsy show that her tumor (at least the one they biopsied) was benign. However, the doc told us that she may develop more mammary tumors, so we will keep an eye out.
We tried to turn her into a house dog, but she wanted NOTHING to do with being inside. She paced, she panted, she didn’t settle. Her comfort zone is outside, so we put her back in the dog yard.
Nikki had 5 teeth removed. She was still panting and whining several weeks after her surgery, so I brought her back to the vet in Bobcaygeon for a chest ex-ray due to rapid breathing (I was counting between 42-58 breaths per minute, which is high). The vet didn’t find anything wrong with her. Her heart and lungs look fine for a dog of her age.
She continues to whine after eating, pant (although it seems not as much as several weeks ago) and she is s super picky eater. Sometimes she eats, sometimes she doesn’t. She likes this crappy food called Roll Over, which is basically meat by products, including lung.
Danny hasn’t been eating well for several years. In 2016 he was diagnosed with pancreatitis, and ever since then he goes through phases of eating and not eating well. I brought him to our local vet for blood work– which turned out to be mostly okay, but his abdomen was painful.
I brought him to Bobcaygeon for an ultrasound, and it’s bad and inconclusive news. He has nodules on multiple organs. The ultrasound could not confirm if it’s cancer or abscesses or cysts.
The Bobcaygeon vet also told us that his previous blood work from our local vet indicates he was never really low thyroid (our local vet diagnosed him with this last year).
If we were to do a biopsy to find out if it is cancer, it would have to be in Toronto and cost around $1400. If it is cancer, a typical treatment for chemotherapy for lymphoma in dogs is around $6000 for treatments 1x a week for 19 weeks. Additionally, the chemo would be palliative and not curative.
Due to the distance to Toronto (3+ hours) and the cost, we’ve decided to not proceed with the biopsy.
We will treat Danny with Cerena for nausea; give him a lower dose of Metacam (he was on too high of a dose for his weight), codeine for abdominal pain, and we’ll try a round of antibiotics in case the nodules are some type of infection. We’ll also ween him off of his thyroid meds.
He’s eating this week, but with Danny, that can rapidly change.