Terrible news

I know the purpose of this blog is mostly to give our friends and family who live far away a peak into our lives as Stian grows since they can’t be here as often as they would like to see for themselves. But our family is bigger than just Kris and me and Stian. We also have our two pups – Toop and Morri. And the other purpose of this blog is to serve as a sort of scrapbook for us. And yesterday we received devastating news about Toop, and I feel the need to post about it.

Toop has bone caner. Or at least the vet is almost positive that she does. We had noticed her limping, but chalked it up to a tussle with Morri or old age. But it didn’t go away. And then the other day Kris noticed her wrist looked funny, and he felt and there was a hard lump in there. So Kris took her to the vet yesterday afternoon, and the prognosis is not good. This type of cancer is very fast moving. And by the time you can see a bump on the outside chances are very high that it has already metastasized. We are heartbroken.

The vet did an x-ray, and while he isn’t 100% certain he’s quite sure it’s cancer. To be 100% certain we have to do a bone biopsy. This involves her spending the night at the vet and have her bone drilled into. We have to decide if that is something we want to put her through or not. Right now we’re leaning towards not doing it.

Treatment for the cancer is amputation of the leg and either chemotherapy or herbal treatments. But even then her life expectancy is not long. It may buy us a little more time. But not much. And what would her quality of life be as a three legged dog? If she were younger we might think more seriously about it. But she’s 11 years and 4 months old – not a young dog. Could she adjust? Would she be able to walk? And it’s a front leg – making it that much more difficult for her to adjust.

Or we can just let it go. And if we do that, we have very little time left. Maybe 2-3 months, maybe more, maybe less. Eventually she will be in so much pain that we can’t let it go on and we will have to make the decision to end her life. Our vet practices traditional Chinese medicine as well as Western medicine, so he can give us some herbs to give her to perhaps slow the cancer and make her more comfortable. He says he’s had good luck with it in other dogs. So we will probably do that.

We are heartsick. Those of you who know Toop have some idea what a very special dog she is. She wants nothing more than to make her people happy. She fetches Kris’s slippers, she brings in the mail, she sits on the back of the sofa and rests her head on our shoulders, she sleeps with her head on Kris’s pillow… There has never been a dog more loved than our little Toop. And there have been lots of tears in our house since we got the terrible news yesterday.