Well I should have started this earlier, but my hope is that it can help someone with any part of the whole process that I just went through, or rather that Doxie did.
A little background on Doxie, she just turned 7 in February, and I have been her owner since she was 2. She broke her femur when she was about 1 year old and had a rod and pins put in. About age 4 the rod and pins were removed after they started getting a little loose and infected because of it. After that, I thought we were home free, at least for a few years we were.
She started to limp around in late January, she had been playing with my sisters dog and it was icy out. We noticed her limping and thought she had probably just pulled something. She seemed to get better over the next week so we carried on like normal. A few more weeks went by and the limp came back and we thought she had maybe re injured herself. We waited for another few days and it didn’t get any better. Took her into the vet and he had guessed a soft tissue injury and put her on Rimadyl and said if she wasn’t better in 3-4 days to bring her back in for an x-ray. It didn’t get better and we took her back in and the x-ray of her leg showed what the vet believed to be Osteosarcoma all in her right hind leg, the same leg she had broken before and had the rod and pins.
That day sucked, I cried like she was already gone or I had already made the decision to just put her down. At that point I had been thinking it was irresponsible to try to save her, and I was being selfish and cruel to keep her alive. Taking a few days to absorb everything and soul search on what we were going to do, we decided to have the x-ray done on her lungs to see if the cancer was visible. We wanted to know that before we made our choice, if the x-ray came back clear (or not rampant enough to be visible yet) we would move forward with the leg amputation/chemo, and if it wasn’t……..
Luckily it came back clear and we scheduled to surgery for the next opening he had which was 5 days away. Those were the LONGEST days of my life, Thursday couldn’t come fast enough and every day Doxie was in more and more pain. We had her on Tramadol so that took the edge off, but it was pretty bad. I was actually relieved the morning we took her in for surgery knowing once that leg was gone that horrible pain would be gone with it.
*More to come later!
Amy & Doxie <3
