Among the many things I inherited a love of from my mother, such as books and weird medical cases, are Christmas ornaments and crafting. Every Christmas since I was little, we would get an ornament in our stocking, and when I moved out, I took my collection with me. It’s a lovely way to have a little nostalgia every December when we set up the tree. I have done the same for my kids, so when they are older they can survey their pile of Tow Mater and Barbie ornaments the way I look over my Garfield collection and have a smile.
I do the same for the pets, but they don’t get a new one every year. When I get a new pet, they get a stocking and an ornament that first Christmas. Each year I put it on the tree and I can be either reminded of how glad I am to have them in my life, or have a smile as I remember them fondly and reminisce about what Christmas decorations they destroyed.
Mulan died on New Year’s Eve, 2008, a couple of months before I started the blog. My mother, still coming down off her post-Christmas rush, spotted a Golden Retriever ornament at a post-Christmas sale and snatched it up, with a brilliant idea: I will glue feathers on it and make Jessica a Mulan-angel ornament. She painstakingly crafted this piece, then set it aside for the year.
As you know if you’re a regular reader, 2009 was a banner year for me in terms of “death, the gift that keeps on giving.” By the time the holiday season arrived, my mother retrieved the ornament from storage and realized geez, I had a whole lot of pets disapparate over the following months. Not wanting anyone to feel left out- glue and feathers are cheap, after all- she hit the stores.
So here is the scene: Christmas morning, 2009. Smiling expectantly, she hands me a beautifully wrapped box, which I assume to be my yearly ornament. I open it. (more…)
For this hour, another fantastic post from the multi-talented Patrick Mahaney, who in addition to his work on his own site and Teddy Hilton is also now blogging at petMD! Thank you for sharing this great post, Patrick!
This article appeared on petMD as part of Dr Mahaney’s The Daily Vet series. The photo is of Quinn, one of my patients who valiantly fought his cancer battle but has since passed on (see Memorial for Quinn the Border Collie Mix).
Cancer. The Big C. The Crab. Regardless of the referential term, the suspected or confirmed diagnosis is life altering for pets and their human owners. The daily routines we share with our pets take on new meaning as the question, “How much time do we have left?” continuously lingers. Speculation regarding the perceived cost, finances, and time involved in treating a pet’s cancer carries additional weight on our already stressed psyche.
For people, the cancer diagnosis causes a mixed bag of emotions, including fear, regret, depression, determination and more. This emotional roller coaster isn’t necessarily experienced by pets, as they may be blissfully unaware of the existence of their disease. Unlike people, pets are also blind to the logistical intricacies, (“How much time will I lose from my ball squeaking duties?”) the societal implications (“What will my friends at the dog park think?”), and financial strains (“Let’s fund-raise with a home-prepared dog treat bake sale!”) of their cancer treatment.
The good news is that due to the numerous therapeutic options available today, pets overcoming cancer and surviving longer. Cancer treatment has evolved to the degree that your pet’s condition may be resolved or well managed with surgery, radiation, medication, or other remedies. As a holistic veterinarian, the “other remedies” are where I focus my energies when consulting on nutritionally bio-available whole food diets and treats, prescribing immune system enhancing supplements and stagnation clearing Chinese herbs, and relieving pain through acupressure and acupuncture.
Although animals and humans share some of the same cancer diagnoses, our pets cannot directly verbalize their health concerns. As the primary guardians of our pets‘ health, we must recognize clinical signs of illness and immediately pursue veterinary evaluation.
I am fortunate to work with the esteemed team of veterinary oncologists at the Veterinary Cancer Group (VCG) in Culver City (Los Angeles), CA. Along with providing cutting-edge cancer treatment to pets, VCG educates people on early illness recognition through their 10 Warning Signs of Cancer in Dogs & Cats.
1. Persistent change in appetite and/or water intake
2. A lump that is enlarging, changing, or waxing and waning in size
3. Progressive weight loss or weight gain
4. Non-healing sore or infection, such as persistent nail bed infection
5. Abnormal odor
6. Persistent or recurring lameness
7. Chronic vomiting or diarrhea
8. Persistent or recurring cough
9. Unexplained bleeding or discharge
10. Difficulty swallowing, breathing, urinating, or defecating
Through my work with VCG oncologists, I have learned so much about the complicated nature of veterinary cancer care. Besides patient treatment, VCG veterinarians have the additional responsibility of navigating the turbulent emotions and financial capabilities of the pet-loving family. Having witnessed the dedication to their craft and to their clients on an ongoing basis, I am giving the VCG oncologists the opportunity to share their views on the current state of cancer treatment for pets:
Mona Rosenberg DVM, Diplomate ACVIM (Oncology), owner, CEO, and Chief of Staff of VCG
“When treating cancer, there is hope for your pet. Pursuing a consultation with a board certified veterinary oncologist will provide you with perspective on the best options available.”
Mary Davis, DVM (Practice Limited to Oncology)
“Veterinary oncology is moving in some exciting new directions. With new advances in treatment options, pets are living longer with a better quality of life while receiving treatments.”
Jared Lyons DVM, Diplomate ACVR (Radiation Oncology)
“Cancer is not a death sentence. With the variety of therapies available to pet owners today, we are able to overcome obstacles that were previously insurmountable.”<
Brigitte Tam-Coleman, DVM (Practice Limited to Oncology)
“There are options for treatment and maintaining patient comfort even when chemotherapy or radiation are not pursued.”
Avanelle Turner, DVM Diplomate ACVIM (Oncology)
“Many different types of cancers are similar to chronic diseases. Like liver, kidney, or heart disease, we manage these conditions (versus curing them), while still providing a good quality of life.”
As cliche as it sounds, projecting positivity and embracing the opportunity to enjoy every moment with your pet is good for everyone involved in the disease management process. With the guidance of a support system (veterinarians, family, friends, etc.), pet caretakers must face companion animal illness with an educated sense of realism as to the possible outcomes.
Even if an absolute cure cannot be achieved, we owe it to our animal companions to provide the best quality of life possible (see Quality of Life Scale). Providing the best care for a severely ill pet may even mean electively discontinuing treatment and pursuing euthanasia. Regardless of the presence of cancer, ending a pet’s life is an inevitable decision for which we must be prepared.
Thank you for reading my article. To receive my next article via email, please press the “Don’t Miss a Blog Post” button on the right upper corner of this page or follow this link.
Please feel free to communicate with me through email (patrick@patrickmahaney.com) or Twitter (@PatrickMahaney).
Copyright of this article (2011) is owned by Dr. Patrick Mahaney, Veterinarian and Certified Veterinary Acupuncturist. Republishing any portion of this article must first be authorized by Dr. Patrick Mahaney. Requests for republishing must be approved by Dr. Patrick Mahaney and received in written format.
I bet you didn’t know that, did you? That’s because I just made it up. It’s the two year anniversary of the day my own heart pet passed on, but I’ve found that the best salve to a broken heart is to commiserate with others who understand that loss. There is sadness, but also joy, in hearing about the bonds you all have shared with those you loved as well.
I really loved putting together the video last year of everyone’s heart pets, and I’ll make sure I re-post that on Thursday. But I’d like to invite anyone who is up for it to post about their own heart pet on Thursday as well, either as a response to my post, on the pawcurious Facebook page, or on your own blog. If more than a couple of people want to write on their own blog I will be happy to make it a blog hop.
I see my memories of my pets like a box in my heart, covered with this grey tarp of sadness I have to lift away every time I want to get to the good stuff. Some days it’s too hard to lift and I have to put the box back, but on this day I want to rip it off and just kind of wade in all the happiness stored within. I hope you will join me!
This week, I heard that a friend and very devoted Golden mom got some really crummy news about the love of her life. I thought I had it bad- I was pretty mad at the universe that Emmett got lymphoma when he was only 7. Teva is only FOUR. Ugh.
That is the roll of the die we take when we invite a pet into our lives, especially one like a Golden who is unfortunately genetically more susceptible to certain cancers. That doesn’t make it suck any less.
I spent a lot of time dissecting my feelings on the topic, whether I wish I had known sooner, or later, or how else I could have approached the situation. I mean, what do you do when you join the Club of Unwelcome Crappy News, watching someone you love jump along blissfully unaware of the clock you now see ticking over their head? A clock that despite how you try, you can’t stop seeing, unable to block out the tickticktick of the hands ticking down?
What do you do? Well, I say you give your dog a donut. (more…)
I weighed Kekoa on Tuesday and I am happy to report that she is back on track at 74.5 pounds- one more pound gone! She really is a trooper. She has this great talent of utilizing her lower center of gravity to butt Brody out of the way when they are jockeying for position at feeding time, so despite her shrinking weight she still had mad leverage skills.
We ran into someone who hasn’t seen Koa since shortly after she came to live with us in March. He was floored. “She’s so shiny!” he said. “And so skinny!” I told him about the Nulo Challenge and how well Koa was doing on the food, how Brody was also scarfing it up and also how jealous Koa was that Brody’s ration was quite a bit more (darn that slow female metabolism.)
I also told him about Koa’s nerve sheath tumor and my conversation with the oncologist. I excised the mass with generous margins but, without knowing what it was, I didn’t take radical measures and cut out muscle and bone. The path report showed the margins were not clean. In short, there is microscopic tumor left that will likely regrow.
Owners have very high expectations of one’s ability to diagnose a condition based on their description, what they read on the internet, and (to a lesser extent) my physical examination. Don’t get me wrong- taking an accurate history and doing a physical examination are instrumental skills. But they are not 100%.
“What is it, doc?” the owner asks as I poke at a lump. I can give you some guesses with a good amount of accuracy based on its appearance, how it moves on or under the skin, that sort of thing. “90% of the time this sort of mass turns out to be a benign lipoma,” I might say. “But I’d still like to verify that.” 10% doesn’t seem like a lot, unless of course you are that 10%.
Koa had a mass on her shoulder that I was 90% sure was a lipoma. I performed a fine needle aspirate, which is the least invasive and most common first-line diagnostic that I use for masses under the skin. I am aware of its limitations- 25% of the time you don’t get a diagnostic sample, especially if you are dealing with the type of mass that sticks to itself tightly and doesn’t like to be sucked into a needle. Perhaps you don’t get the needle into the right portion of the mass. False negatives happen.
Koa’s aspirate was full of fat, just like your typical lipoma. So I watched it.
Last week, I revisited the mass and decided that it might be bigger. In my fingers, it behaved just like your typical lipoma- squishy, easily moving around in the subcutaneous fat without digging into the muscle beneath. But maybe it was just a teeny bit firmer than I would like? So I stuck a needle in it. Fat cells, again.
At that point, I had reached the limitations of the aspirate. I could do a more extensive biopsy, but in this case I decided to just remove the blasted thing. And guess what? It was fatty. Fatty tissue surrounding a smaller, firm, ugly ball of something decidedly not-fat.
I will let a pathologist slice it, look at it under a microscope and tell me all the things my eyes and fingers cannot: the type of cell, the margins, how likely it is to grow back. I know that many of these types of tumors can be cured with one surgery, if you happen to remove them before they do nasty invasive things.
So I wait for the results, keep my fingers crossed, and remind myself to be glad I don’t rely on numbers. After all, the median survival time for a lymphoma patient on chemo is 12 months, not two. I trust cancer not a whit.
While I was cavorting at BlogPaws this weekend, my husband was getting some work done around the house, a task I truly appreciate as I despise housework with the hot flames of a thousand suns. While I would like to think this was because he just loves me that much, the cynic in me also whispered that perhaps he was just buttering me up for the abandonment that comes with the start of the NFL football season.
No matter. I am still happy.
One of his self-appointed tasks was to hang some pictures on the wall. As you probably know if you’ve been hanging around here long enough, my husband is a fabulous photographer. Despite what you might think based on the pawcurious Flickr page, he spends even more time photographing our human kids than he does our animal ones, and he had several really cute ones blown up and framed to put on the walls.
“That’s you,” he said to our son, pointing to a closeup of a pudgy cheeked, blue eyed baby peeking out of the frame.
“And that’s you,” he said to our daughter, gesturing to a happy moment of her toddlerhood where she faced Emmett, arms thrown over his leonine scruff, sitting nose to nose. “There’s you and Emmett.”
“Oh,” she said, peering at the photo. “I thought that was Brody.” Poor Brody gets that a lot. They are eerily similar.
And then she looked at me guilelessly, she who grew up under the shaggy shade of Emmett’s shadow, the child who brought him a plastic bag to function as a chemo blanket, who sobbed while Daddy read “Dog Heaven” to her since I couldn’t make it past page 2, and said,
I appreciate all the thoughtful comments yesterday, and especially I appreciate everyone who sent me a picture of their beloved pets to be included in yesterday’s video. It was wonderful to see how many people knew what this day would mean, because you all have had this kind of day too.
Yesterday was shaping up to be the same type of day I have been (thankfully) having for quite a while lately: simple and uneventful.
As I was driving home yesterday, I was thinking about Emmett and how much has changed in the past year. One year ago, I said goodbye. One year ago, I sat 10 feet from where I am now with my head on his neck for the last time, while he sighed into my hands, too tired to even roll over for a belly rub. It was a bad day.
I was thinking about how, after he died, our house was the cleanest it had been in years. The tumbleweeds were gone- the ever present little hair balls that found their way into corners no matter how much we brushed or vacuumed. I would look around the tidy floors, and tear up because I missed those tumbleweeds.
And now we have them again, and I have Brody and Koa. I could play the whatif game inside my head all day- whatif Emmett didn’t die? Where would Brody be today? Would Koa still be in rescue? And then I remember, what might have happened, or could have happened, is all irrelevant. All that matters is what did happen.
The tumbleweeds are back, and yes they are different, but they are here, and I am happy.
As I sat at a stoplight mulling this over, a little puff of something- I don’t know what it was exactly, a small white feather or puff of fur- blew in through the open window, and danced in front of my face for a second or two. I grabbed for it, but it had already caught the eddy of wind and blew out the other side of the car. I am probably overthinking things to say that a wayward feather blowing into the car somehow represented an extremely profound moment, but it did.
Yes, it’s going to be a hard day today, but it is OK. Things are as they are supposed to be.
A little while back, I asked on Facebook if anyone would like to contribute a photo of a pet who has passed for a little project I was doing to mark this day. This is it. I hope I have honored them well.
One year ago today, I wrote what turned out to be a rather iconic post. If you aren’t familiar with why I keep referring to my undying hatred of Kevin, that post explains it. The anniversary of Emmett’s passing is next week, and I am already dreading it.
I have lost dogs before, and will, I am sure, go through it again though I am hoping that day is far from now. Over time, the sharp pains of grief turn into more of a dull ache, which in time recedes into the corners of one’s mind and only occasionally makes itself known. Eventually, even that wears away, to be replaced by the dusty shimmer of fond remembrance.
But when you are talking about that once in a lifetime dog, the one whose heart so effortlessly grew into yours, the scars left behind when they are ripped from it take longer to heal. This week, my dear friend was in town for a visit, and hadn’t seen Brody for a while.
“Oh wow,” she said. “He looks just like Emmett.”
“He does,” I agreed sadly. “He doesn’t act anything like him, though.”
It was not my choice to end up with a dog who so closely resembled the one he succeeded. I would have preferred that not to be the case. It’s not Brody’s fault that he is not Emmett, and I wouldn’t expect him to be. Nonetheless, I still find myself slipping on occasion when I’m not paying attention and calling him the wrong name, then realizing no, that one is not here.
I received this lovely gift from Amy Valentine after Emmett passed away. I wear it regularly. It helps ward off the ache. I will have it on next week, when I find myself lost in the memories of those last few days at Dog Beach, of the stranger who approached me to take our picture, moved by some tangible expression passing between Emmett and myself our last time there, of the feel of his fur in my hands as I rested them on his still form.
Many years ago, at my very first job, I had the good fortune to meet a technician who was also to become a wonderful friend. We were young, both new to our jobs, and flush with the excitement of entering this field. We had new pets: I had Emmett, 2 at the time, and had recently rescued Mulan as a 5 year old. Amber had just adopted an adorable orange fluffball named O’Malley.
O’Malley was many things: confident, sassy, a bit of a handful. And by “a bit” I mean “a majorly huge handful.” He’d pounce on your head while you were sitting on the couch, bite the dog on the tail and then act offended when the dog reacted, swipe you across the face just for walking by. He would wait until Amber finished cooking dinner, and then just as they were sitting down, he’d go into the litterbox and foul the air with his stinkiness. Every night.
Later in life, O’Malley moved in with another good friend who is also a technician, Libby. Libby’s task was even more challenging, since she inherited not an adorable orange fluffball but an ornery Garfield lookalike with a nasty case of asthma. She tirelessly nursed him through his wheezing, whittled his weight down to a manageable size, and loved him despite his penchant for pooping at inopportune times.
Do you know Batman the cancer dog? I didn’t either, until today, when I read that he died. This is sad news, but also one that represents a great victory.
By Richard Sennott, Star Tribune
Batman was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor in 2008; according to the news article, the same type as that which took Senator Ted Kennedy- a glioblastoma. Average survival time for a human: about one year. The senator survived 15 months.
Batman survived 19 months.
Needless to say, most pets with a diagnosis of cancer live for far shorter periods than their human counterparts. This is for a variety of reasons, as you can imagine. So why did Batman make it so long?
He took part in a federally funded cancer research trial in the field of comparative oncology. It’s without a doubt a win-win; Batman’s parents were spared the enormous bill they were not able to afford otherwise, and the researchers are able to move forward with much less red tape than had they been working with human participants.
There are clinical trials in veterinary medicine designed for veterinary patients, but it’s reality that research money for diseases affecting humans with always be in greater supply. While the trials are ostensibly for the benefit of us humans, who can argue with the nice side effect of maybe finding something our pets can use as well? We’ll take what we can get, right?
Without the study, Batman’s owners would probably not have sought treatment. In those cases, median survival time is about 3 months. He survived 19. That is a lot of extra trips to the park, lots of tummy rubs, lots and lots of added memories.
So yes, this is a victory, for Batman, and for all of us who may benefit from the research he took part in.
