Sadly I don’t have good news

Jose’s brain tumor came back and this time inside his brain instead of in between his brain and skull. He started having seizures, first one and then again 3-4 weeks later, then 2 days later, then 2 days later and every 2-3 hours. We rushed him to the emergency vet at 2:30am. They stabilized him and we waited to hear from the neurosurgeon who, with our permission, did a CT scan and delivered the sad news.

Thanksgiving has not been the best time for us. 3 dogs were diagnosed with cancer of some sort around Thanksgiving and 2 passed away right before Thanksgiving.

Jose Cuervo

Meet Jose Cuervo

When I first joined Tripawds in 2017, like many, it was because my beloved dog, Gabby, lost her leg to osteosarcoma and sadly lost her fight 4 months later. We still miss her greatly. She arrived at our home a year before our older dog died. Jose Cuervo, you read that right, arrived at our home a year before Gabby died. Yes, I was nervous when he showed up. He was skinny and about 2. We tried to find his owners but no one claimed him or was looking for him.

 

Convinced he was a mutt, I had him DNA tested. He came back American Bully with no know health issues. Fast forward to today and on Monday he came home from having surgery for osteosarcoma and multilobular osteochondrosarcoma (MLO). Skull cancer! 

We took him first to our vet because he would sway from side to side and back and forth. She couldn’t find anything but some back pain. about 2 weeks later, he was walking like he was on a boat on rough seas and would fall down if she shook. We took him to an ER were originally told he most probably had wobblers and the bump on his head (which appeared to have gotten bigger from 2 weeks ago) was nothing. We were referred to a neurologist that couldn’t see him for 6 weeks so I contacted my vet to find another and it’s a good thing. She knew immediately what was going on and a week later he was in surgery.

Here he is now home. We are still waiting for the results of the tumor and once we have that, then we make plans for radiation. He is also on homeopathic meds from Dr. Loops in Pittsboro. He also treated Gabby and I found what he sent was very helpful. I wish I did more extensive bloodwork or asked more questions. Maybe she would have lived longer.

This was before surgery. You can kinda see the bump.

This is an older pic. Happy Holidays!

2 years 1 month 18 days

It’s been 2 years, 1 month and 18 days since Gabby passed.  The other day, like many days, I was reflecting on her and in my thoughts I said, “She was the best dog ever.” WAS. I never since she has passed every thought of her in the past tense. I always said, “Gabby’s the best!” As soon as I did this, I realized what I had done and my eyes, like now, filled up with tears. “Was.” The saddest word.  My heart is breaking all over possibly worse than before. She IS the best dog ever. To me.

The finding of a puppy in the woods

Today marks a year that Gabby has been gone and I think of her always and miss her terribly. I was going to post this soon after but wanted it to be perfect. One day passed into another and I kept making excuses as to when to reread before posting and what to add to it. In a sense, I was dreading having to look at it as if by my not acknowledging this page would mean she was not gone. Not so. She will be forever missed. We will continue to be heartbroken. I keep hoping the movie A Dogs Purpose is real and she will find us and come back.

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I was working in my office when my husband said to me “There is a puppy out front in the woods. Help me catch it.” I thought, Really? So I went with him out front thinking how hard can it be to catch a puppy. Well, she did not want to be caught. She was tiny. Only 8 weeks old and about 11 lbs. She finally hid in the stump of a tree that had fallen. I went and got this canned dog food that we had to feed our dog we had that passed away from cancer. She wouldn’t eat anything so we resorted to this canned food. Anyway, I figured it was the only thing we had that was stinky that a puppy might like. I fed it to her on my finger in the tree stump bit by bit. She still would not come out but she did eat the food and lick my finger. I finally told my husband to scare her out and I will grab her. I had to go back to work and this was going to take all day at this rate. He scared her and I grabbed her and she bit me! As I got up holding her in my arms, I said, “That wasn’t very nice.” She just looked at me.

We had another dog that was quite large so I told my husband to get the crate and I will put her in it to protect her from our large dog not knowing what he might do. So we did that. Set up a towel for her to lay on, a bowl for water and gave her more food to eat. She did not seem at all upset by all this loss of freedom. But she did watch everyone very carefully.

We took her to the vet the next day because she was covered in ticks and did not know what to do. They were able to remove them and they gave her a parvo shot. I can’t remember if there were other shots but whatever the puppy shots are, she got them and 3 days later she spent 5 days in the hospital with parvo! I’ll never forgot that after one night there, the vet, a different one than the one who admitted her, said to me I may want to consider putting her down! I said to her, “She has not even been her a day!” She never said anything else to me. I could understand if she were concerned that we could not afford 5 days but say so and then let me decide. Geeze! We visited her every day twice a day while she was there. I was so surprised and touched when I went to visit her and she wagged her tail.

They wanted a name at the hospital. I am Catholic and I found her on the Feast of the Annunciation so I named her after the Archangel Gabriel. I know a girl named Gabriela. The female of Gabriel. Gabby for short.

And something you should  know, at this time, I never intended to keep her. I was going to get her shots, train her and put her up for adoption. I was still sad at the passing of our other dog and did not want another.

I would carry her everywhere because she was so tiny and we are in a 2 story house. I’d carry her upstairs and keep her by me while I worked so if she had to go out I would know. I remember one time I had to run upstairs to get something and I put her at the bottom and said I’d be right back, stay here. I know she had no idea what I was saying but it felt good. I ran upstairs and moments later, she was right there next to me all pleased with herself. She did the stairs all by herself. I had to teach her how to go down but she picked that up just as fast and made sure I understood I did not need to carry her anymore. She was big girl now.

We originally thought she was a Border Collie mix because a friend of mine said “Looks like you found a Border Collie.” I thought “What?” I searched for info and started to follow all the training advice which thankfully worked, like telling to her to “go potty”.  Because she had parvo, I could not take her to training classes until she was 6 months old and fixed. She was the smallest in the class and we learned she had lots of fear based aggression issues which we continued working through. There were many days I told her I was going to send her to Cell Dogs. The popular show at the time.

She was very smart. We had a game for the first 2 yrs of her life called Tricks for Treats. She not only learned tricks but taught us many things as well. Like that she understood concepts like choosing toys or treats or if I told her not to growl at the other dogs, she would just “smile” at them. The silent threat. Lol

She would listen attentively to anyone who had something to say which was funny to find people start telling us something finish by telling it to her who would sit there in front of them looking at them.

She knew what was meant by Grandma and Grandpa are coming. We had to stop telling her that weeks in advance because she would go looking for them. And when they were almost to our house, she was there waiting, knowing they were almost here.

Sometimes when we would leave the house without her, we could hear her howling. I would say she is singing the blues. She sounded like a wolf. A beautiful sound.

She would come with me to the barn and lay out front waiting for me to finish. I would cherish looking at her so peacefully looking out and then I would think one day she will not be there.

 

Many nights, she would go up to bed early and I would here all this grumbling and growling. I went upstairs only to find she had “pulled down the blankets” and gotten into bed. She could do no wrong. LOL  How can I be mad when she was so happy to see me?

I started calling her my therapy dog, my little stress reliever. She is terribly missed.

 

Gabby’s Journey

Gabby’s amputation and cancer journey with integrative medicine.

I am writing this almost a  month after Gabby has passed. I wanted to start it from the beginning but there was too much going on in my house to do everything I wanted.

We are heartbroken. She will be forever missed. But so you know before hand, she did very well and was very happy always.

Gabby, started limping in August, 2017. The vet thought it was her knee. They did take xrays and decided to retake in a month because of shading on her upper thigh. We took them again a month later and the shading was still there but had not changed. We continue treating her knee with Chinese meds and Devcor. Sometimes she seemed to be getting better but anytime they manipulated her knee it got worse so it really seemed like a knee thing. Her Chiropractor thought it was coming from up high on her leg and not the knee. Probably where the shading was.

 

Months later, Nov, she was going down a couple of stairs outside on a leash and twisted and broke her leg. It was osteosarcoma, the shading and where her leg broke. The choice was euthanasia or amputate. Despite her being almost 14, she never seemed like she was aging any so the only option for us was amputate.
Her leg was amputated on Nov 20th. The surgery went well and after a day in the hospital, she game home with a drainage tube which we were supposed to drain and measure until our next visit a week later. What they didn’t tell us was that it could clog! Thanks to Google, we found that out about the clogging how to unclog it. The first couple of days she recovered slowly but she did get better each day, regaining her strength. No issues at all.

 

She came home wearing this blue thing to keep the drainage tube in place. She is laying on it. Goes to show, no pain.
 
Our next visit the tube was removed and she continued healing. We decided not to do chemo at that time because of the drive and her hating to be in the car and because we had another dog years ago that had IV chemo and it was rough so we did not want to put her through it at 14 and having the stress of driving 45 mins there and back. It certainly seemed that chemo or no chemo had the same or too similar a prognosis.

 

We decided to use Dr Loops for homeopath and Chinese meds from our vet. We were always careful with her diet but got even more careful. She always ate raw food from Primal with a hand full of Taste of the Wild dry, a tablespoon of Greek yogurt, 2 pumps of fish oil, 1/2 tsp Golden Paste & Honest Kitchen Bone Broth.  I eliminated the dry dog food, added more raw to hide the additional pills and make up for the loss of dry food. She loved everything she ate and was doing well.

 

Here is a list of what we were giving her. Keep in mind some of it started before the additional Chinese meds for her knee and Homeopath which I make note of:

 

  • Jing Tang Body Soar –  1 pill 3x a day  (approx 2 grams) (started early)
  • Jing Tang Ligament Concentrate –  1 pill 3x a day (started early)
  • Jing Tang Bone Stasis Concentrate Formula – 1 pill 3x a day
  • Jing Tang wei qi. 2 pills 2x a day
  • Vetri Science Devcor – 2 a day (started early)
  • Vetri Science SAMe – 2 a day (started early)
  • Bio Dent by Standard Process – 2 twice a day (started early, for her teeth)
  • NaturPet VitaPet Senior w/glucosamine – 2 twice a day (started early)
  • Grizzly Salmon Oil – 2 pumps twice a day (started early)
  • Golden Paste – (Turmeric, coconut oil, cinnamon, pepper) about1 teaspoon twice a day (started early) (we, humans, still take this for inflammation and arthritis)
  • Honest Kitchen Bone Broth – about 3 tbsps in food 3x a day
  • Life Gold- 2 eye droppers a day.
  • Milk Thistle: 6 drops 2x a day
  • K9Medicinal: attached pdf  4 a day
Homepathic:
  • Sulfer
  • Hecla Lava
  • Carcinoma

 

Her energy increased with the Homepathic remedies and for 2.5 months, she was doing really well. We never let her outside without the help of a butt harness or wheels. We were so afraid that with her age the good leg would blow out. She ran my husband all over the place with the harness.

 

She started loosing energy and at one point collapsed. The acupuncturist thinks it may have been a small seizure. We never did find out exactly what caused this. On Feb 23rd she went for xrays and it showed in her lungs that the cancer returned. First, we also contacted Dr Loops who sent Kali Carbonicum for her lungs which seemed to help immediately. She hardly ever coughed. We had an appt with an oncologist for March 5th. When they took xrays, they found the cancer also showed in one vertebra and maybe a tumor in her abdomen. We had a lot more to deal with than lung cancer. And she had become anemic. Her blood was 25%.

 

We started metronomic chemo on March 6th which meant we were to alternate Palladia and Cytoxan every other day. Cytoxan was started on Friday because they had to mail it to us.  We told Dr Loops about the anemia and he sent something else (Ferrum something?) for the anemia. The oncologist also gave us a Chinese medicine, Yunnan Baiyao which has a very interesting history, to stop any bleeding in her lungs and elsewhere since they believed she may have a tumor in her abdomen that may be taking blood.

 

She started off not doing badly. Not great like after the amputation but she kept eating really well and her energy came and went. Before her She had a 2 week recheck with the oncologist and the anemia was not any worse. Her breathing had changed slightly but she was not gasping for air or anything like that. We decided to stop the Cytoxan because it seemed to make her weak and we wanted her to feel good and we were concerned about the anemia. The Palladia did not seem to have that effect so kept giving that one every other day.

 

Here she is wanting my breakfast.

 

This picture was taken March 21st. She usually always laid on the missing leg/hip.

Unfortunately she did not make her next 2 week recheck. A week earlier on Sunday, she started having diarrhea again. She had it the first week as well and had to go on antibiotics. This time we were able to get it back to normal within 1 or 2 days but her energy did not return like in the past. We were going to have her blood checked on Thursday, March 29th, but that morning she did not want to eat and was very weak. That was the first time she ever refused food. The day before she started drinking more and more water. We could here the fluid in her abdomen and she was not urinating not even close to what she was drinking which continued on Thursday morning. We decided to take her straight to the vet hospital to see her oncologist.

Her oxygen was at 92%, her blood was at 19%. It should be at least 40%. The vet said that if we took her home and she survived the evening, she would feel awful. There was nothing they could do to help and anything they suggested would keep her in the hospital with no real potential for a cure or good prognosis. We did not want her to feel any worse or leave her alone in a hospital knowing she probably would never come home. We decided it was time to say goodbye. 🙁