June 1-3

Boy these days went by quick! I’ve been meaning to do two day updates, but given all the circumstances I figured I’d just throw all this into one. Eva had a great few days! Day four n five Eva started getting a lot more energy back, more playful and happy than she was in the couple months leading up to her amputation that is definitely for sure. She really loves our neighbors and everyone always comes to see her when she goes and sits outside (potty breaks that really turn into “but mom lets lay in the sun”) so that definitely perks her up. Everybody loves friends :b

The night of Day 4 we had something scary happen. We were outside and Eva went to step up on a rock and as I tried getting her from stepping up onto it- theyre like, landscaping blocks but i could tell by the way it was angled she wasnt gonna be able to stand on it right- she slipped. She smacked her butt right on the ground, but just barely, because I was right underneath her. I grabbed her almost before she hit the ground, but the very very edge of her butt hit the ground. She fell into an awkward position into my arms as I tried to reposition her so as to save the “good leg,” or what is now the only leg lol. She let out a cry like I’ve never heard before and I was positive we did damage. I was mortified. After all this, a slip and fall is what does us in? I don’t think so.

Super human strength kicked in and I carried her to the front door. Once we got there she wasn’t crying and she was just looking at me with those big “mom, what happened?” eyes. We checked her incision out and everything was perfectly fine. She stood up on her own like a little baby deer and walked into our bedroom. She still begged me for a treat so I knew she was fine, because Eva is VERY finicky as of the last several months and even the littlest thing will make her refuse a treat. By the next day you couldn’t even tell it had happened. PHEW.

Day six gave us our diagnosis. It was an osteosarcoma. But we knew that the whole time, in our minds. Whether we had the biopsy results or not, we knew. So really it doesn’t change anything. We have to call and make an appointment in a couple weeks with the oncologist. Does anyone have advice as to what kinds of questions I should be asking? I guess I still don’t really know what’s happening, I’m just sort of on autopilot.

Her bruising has gone down a lot, but there’s a piece of bandage stuck on her underneath the incision.
I’ve tried baby oil, warm water, etc. It bugs her when I touch it but I know it needs to come off…

???

Here we are! We made it this far! Trying to be as pawsitive as pawsible. Eva’s eating sort of okay (about half as much kibble as normal but shows interest in treats and eats baby food.) I’m gonna order some honest kitchen grain free samples for her because I feel like she’ll like them but I’m not gonna order 10lbs of something I’m not sure about. I’ve made that mistake enough times >.<

Day two, which was yesterday, we noticed a lot of bruising. I mentioned it in the forums but I wanna document it here. I was definitely not nervous when I saw it but I still wanted  to show people because it’s nice to just have the extra reassurance. I showed a vet tech and she agreed that it was perfectly normal two day post-operative bruising! Which I basically knew anyway but I am 50 minutes away from the vet, or about a half hour if I’m taking the freeway which I don’t like to do because mush likes to stand in the backseat and if she’s unstable or something is wrong it’s kinda hard to drive freeway speed and keep her safe at the same time.

So there’s her day two bruising. Today, day 3, it looks a little less bad honestly. Which is cool because it looks like someone pinched her really hard and it makes my stomach hurt. The bandages are holding on, which is a relief because Mush loves to rub her butt up against everything and she honestly still keeps wanting to rub that side on the edge of the couch and i have to stop her and I just don’t need her touching that incision against the couch. Seriously. Talking about it makes me so sick feeling!

She’s tired today for sure. We haven’t let her outdo herself or anything but she definitely is sleepy. She is alert and shows interest when she hears a noise that perks her up. She dictates when she has to go outside to go potty and when we’re outside she usually wants to stay out and wander around a little since I take her in the front now on her leash. Today it’s been pouring rain so it’s been a little harder to get miss priss out. Even before she got sick we would laugh because she HATES wet grass, she’ll go in the back yard and back her butt up to the edge of where the grass meets the driveway and she’ll squat and pee onto the grass and then go running back inside with her ears tucked behind her head like a fighter jet.

She makes some weird breathing noises but I feel like she’s always made them. I think this is one of those instances where I’m over analyzing an old behavior because I don’t have a diagnosis and I feel like every single thing is related. It isn’t like it is something that happens all the time, it just seems like her airways close every once in a while when she’s asleep and she’ll take a huge deep breath to fix it and then maybe cough once or twice and that’s the end of it. She’s always snored, bad. I imagine she’s just sleeping harder now. She doesn’t seem to be in pain or uncomfortable and when she wants to move she can get up and move freely so I know if she was having trouble breathing she would let me know.

it’s definitely our bed time!

I feel like I just won’t ever forget this  day. We went to see Dr. Hewitt,  which is our orthopedic surgeon who  we had spoken to when we thought  Eva might potentially need a TPLO  surgery conducted. I thought we  were going so she could tell me they  had to cut out a bunch of Mush’s  muscle and they were gonna also do  a TPLO because they were in there  and I was gonna have to argue that we still couldn’t get a cranial drawer and my dog is young and blah blah. I didn’t want a big incision.

I was completely jarred.

Dr. Hewitt had the x-rays the day they were taken. She said she thought they had mistakenly sent her someone else’s. There’s no way this could be the same dog that she saw just about two months ago.

Dr. Hewitt said the mass on Eva’s knee from the radiograph was definitely a bony tumor. Great. Part of me feels like I knew it all along, so what inappropriate reaction do I have? I start laughing. Fantastic.

Of course it is…

So now what? Can we cut it out? She said, “well,” and I just laughed, I could just feel it coming. I knew they were taking Eva’s leg. But what’s weird about all this is from the moment she was toe touching, I knew. In my mind I knew the whole time. I had already come well to terms with it in my mind I think and as I sit here almost 15 hours from the time I brought her home post amputation, I have still not cried one time since they told me what was happening. On May 28th, the day of the actual surgery, I spent a lot of time with family and friends. I went to a local aquarium and spent time crawling in all of the little kid tubes as an adult and just tried to focus on other things.

But enough about me.

They gave us some Cerenia the night before because of the morphine used in the amp surgery. It made her so ridiculously knocked out. We definitely will give her half dosage if we ever need to use that stuff again. I mean she was like, cold and fairly unresponsive. To be completely honest, I held her all night (she usually cuddles anyways so she wasn’t upset) and told myself when I fell asleep that when I woke up, she may very well not be breathing in my arms. I was prepared and was saying goodbye until I fell asleep holding her.

The morning of her surgery she was sick. When we woke up, it was two hours before she was to be dropped off and we woke up because she just laid in bed whimpering. She does the high pitch exhale breath cry thing and even when it’s so quiet, it immediately wakes me up because I just have that crazy instinct with her. She was so uncomfortable. She couldn’t do anything comfortably at all. For two hours we were miserable. I mean, things had been hard the last two weeks or so because she would wake up all through the night but I had attributed that to her urinary food that made her drink a lot more water. I figured that’s why she wanted to go stand outside for a bit, pee a drop and then come back in. Really she was just restless and in pain. But none of that compared to how bad she was before I dropped her off for surgery. She was absolutely horrible. It broke my heart.

I took a moment to paint her toenails orange on her right side.

Her surgery took around two and a half hours and the surgeon regarded it as “uneventful.” She said Eva was doing great in the hospital except not eating- which I wasn’t terribly surprised of considering the fact that she was pretty uninterested in eating from anyone besides me for the last couple weeks. We had gotten her back to the same amount of food she was eating prior to her hospitalization only a couple days before her surgery so it was sort of really bad timing for that stuff anyways. Besides, a dog that isn’t half as active as she usually has been isn’t going to nor does she need to eat as much as she’s used to. We still don’t know WHAT that thing is in her knee, or her former knee. They sent the entire leg out for testing, I know we’re all on pins and needles hoping it isn’t OS, but no matter the circumstances I have a strange feeling that E is gonna beat the odds. They said she was laying around. Quiet. Pouting basically unless someone would come rub her ears. I wish I could just lay next to her.

But then today came!

They called this morning to let me know I was able to bring her home. Imagine that. Wednesday I find out she’s got to have a leg removed and Friday she’s laying in bed with me again. They brought her through the doors to see me and that dummy was so happy! I was so happy to see her I wasn’t even scared of the nub. I was worried that it might make me sick (I know I haven’t really delved into explaining E and I’s relationship but I’ve had her since she was three weeks old and if you try to tell me I didn’t birth her myself you’re in for an earful) or that I would stare at it and make her nervous because she’s uncomfortably receptive to my emotions as an alert emotional support dog. I heard the tech say “I know, you wanna see mama!” and I got so excited and she came in the room and I just dropped to the floor for my dog bath and she was wagging her tail so hard and so happy and walking so beautiful. She walked great. Did I say that?! We went outside because my dad pulled the big truck around and I had the tech come outside to make sure I could appropriately handle Eva on my own; I wanted that reassurance in case I touched her in a painful way or in a way that might increase her bruising later on.

My dog has three legs! She’s so much happier than she was the day before her surgery. I really think that if we hadn’t figured this all out by now, the day of her surgery would’ve been the day I would’ve had to have said goodbye because she was crying from 5am until we got into the car at 7 to drive the hour long trip to the surgeons office. When she got home she wanted to play a little bit with a new toy I bought her and she ate a couple crunchies (our word for her hard food kibble, kind of a way we started helping getting her to eat again after her overdose.) When she was at the vet today before I picked her up they were able to give her some chicken because the lady played a little game with her and she was really into it haha. Sounds like my Mushy. When she came home she’s been kinda sleepy but we haven’t had good sleep in months because she was always so uncomfortable, plus she’s on good medicine for the pain as her 24 hour local analgesic is starting to wear off. I am so happy to have her home and pain free, even if the results of this arduous journey didn’t end up where we thought they would (two days ago I thought they could give me a shot to fix her leg….) but I just have this crazy feeling that she’s really gonna do great, even if the path results come back and aren’t the most encouraging. She’s got so much fight in her, it’s so beautiful. I have never been so inspired by something, and she’s my own baby mush!!!

so happy, so comfortable. this is the best she’s slept in months. :’)
I already know that even if she only has a little while left, this was the best thing for her.

she’s my hero <3

This is Eva. At the time this photo was taken she was a happy two year old ready to take on the world (or even just the local metro park.) Within a few months, we would begin to notice a few subtle changes in Eva’s rear gait. Now, I should probably mention now that I call Eva by six trillion different names like E, mushy, mushball, princess, and basically any combination of all of that. Oh sometimes I even call her Eva! So anyways, at this point in time things were great. She is a well behaved baby who loves love, loves to explore, and was working on figuring out how to stay close enough to me on walks to where she was allowed off leash in big open areas! All of that came to a stop in the fall of 2014.

Like I said, initially we noticed small differences. I don’t even think we noticed them at first but once there was a bunch of little things, we started to figure it out. Eva likes to run in our small back yard and occasionally will turn some pretty tough tight corners, which means her back legs would occasionally slip out from under her and she would fish tail. It was never a problem. In 2014 we noticed when there was snow on the ground this tended to happen rather often so we had to keep her more relaxed in the yard. We noticed she came in one day and kinda slipped up the stairs leading into the kitchen, seemed like she rolled her toes a little, and started to stand kinda funny after that.
(sorry for the blur)

Around the time she started dragging her leg, I got nervous. I thought she sprained something or tugged on something wrong and I decided that it was time to watch it. I guess this seems to all work on a really clean timeline because I would say it was about January 1st when I said if she wasn’t walking better in a week we had to go to the vet. Eva has horrible vet anxiety so I try to hold off as much as possible because it can be a really stressful experience for both her and I to go to our family vet. I’m not sure why, but the waiting room freaks E out really bad and they ALWAYS make us wait in an exam room forever. I’m sure I’ll complain more about that later (as much as I love my actual family animal doctor, I hate their support staff.) It was January 10, 2015 when we finally got her in and got her leg x-rayed to see if there was a break or anything crazy going on.

Family vet said her xray came back well enough to where she couldn’t figure out the source of the lameness in the right leg (I feel like I forgot to even mention that aspect, it’s the right hind leg) so she referred me to go see an orthopedic surgeon at a facility about an hour north of my home to determine if Eva maybe had some cranial cruciate damage. She didn’t get a cranial drawer response but who knows. So we go to the orthopedic surgeon and (to sum up about three months of trials and tribulations) there was nothing noticeable wrong with Eva’s leg. Eva had no cranial drawer response and was still acting as normal as ever, just clearly uncomfortable with something. We explained to our orthopedic surgeon what happens with E’s legs when she runs and spins the corners, and the vet immediately felt up inside of her pelvic muscles and E screamed away. This was when she was diagnosed with an iliopsoas injury. We were happy with this diagnosis despite the fact that it could take up to three months to heal back to where she could use the leg comfortably. We were sent home with the infamous Rimadyl and tramadol as well as some alprazolam to keep my little wired princess less wired and more sleepy cuddly princess.

Over time I felt as though the medicine wasn’t helping, when she would lay down, she seemed to position the leg REALLY awkwardly and would never lay down for an extended period of time without adjusting herself or kicking around with that right leg. Some of the weird positions (in the chronological order I noticed them, too) are underneath here.

So clearly something uncomfortable was happening and changing.

The day we got back from the orthopedic surgeon, she told us to get another few weeks of Rimadyl as a soft tissue injury as deep as E’s could take a while to heal and Eva was actually doing fantastic on the Rimadyl. It reduced her pain a lot and we never had any negative side effects. I felt completely safe and comfortable using it. I went to my family vet and had them write me a month’s worth and I took it home.

On April 24th, Eva’s small bottle of Rimadyl was gone and I brought the larger mouthed bottle down from the cabinet and put it on the counter where all of her meds go. In a real twist of fate, when I left the house for ten minutes, my cat (had plastic still stuck in her teeth) chewed a nice chunk out of the top of the bottle as she tends to be a real pest about anything she doesn’t feel belongs in wherever place it occupies, and while she was doing that, she knocked the bottle to the ground. Lid was cracked so it fell off, and because we had always given the Rimadyl to E in the form of a treat (make her sit or stay or touch before giving it to her, they’re flavored, it always made her not realize it was medicine) she smelled it and went in for the kill.

Eva ingested 3000mg of Rimadyl on April 24th.

I don’t wanna get too far into that story because we thought it was so traumatic at the time that I could go on forever, but the fact is that Eva’s levels NEVER went out of a normal range (she was tested every 8 hours) she never got sick, etc. However she did have to spend four days getting her whole system flushed out. This means that when she came home she no longer was under the influence of the Rimadyl that she had been taking for somewhere around three months by this point, maybe closer to four.

We thought she was traumatized from the vet. She wouldn’t eat right, she was just happy to be around us but not much else. She was not the happy two year old we had once spent so much time playing with and yelling at for being rambunctious and biting the cat too hard or jumping too forcefully onto the tv table. When she had her one week check up post overdose, she had a pretty gross bladder infection and a couple calcium oxalate crystals in her urine (only two appeared in the sample but we put her on urinary S/O just incase) so we made another appointment to come back a couple weeks later when her antibiotics were completed. The vet appointment would also include more x-rays because even though E was using the leg the same amount as before the hospitalization, all of a sudden her muscle just started to die, her toes on her right foot began to not look right, and she appeared to have a very swollen knee.

All the while this was going on, she had always been toe touching. We have hardwood floors and we covered everything in rugs to make sure it was as easy as possible for her to remain mobile while in the home. I feel this is important to note. When she came home from the hospital, she no longer was using her leg. She would use it if it was a hot day and we went on a walk, but we had to walk at just the right pace to get some movement. Mind you, we were still thinking this was related to a soft tissue injury so we were advised to continue her short walks 2x a day. She is used to walking miles and miles so a block twice a day was torture to her. She would cry to stay out, and we spent A LOT of time laying around the backyard. Over the three weeks between her coming from the hospital and the day we went back in for an updated urinalysis and her x-rays, I feel like my dog changed completely. The princess was not the princess. She was sad, will only eat from MY hand, wants to lay in bed instead of hanging out in the main portion of the house… it was very sad to watch.

–

On May 22nd, I had an appointment with our family vet. We did x-rays.

This is what we found.

Eva is three. At the time, this is three days before her third birthday, but Eva is three. She is the sweetest mushy in the world, and wants nothing more than affection and attention and to play outside and love on her kitty and her toys and just has so much life. This isn’t cancer. The family vet seems convinced that it’s a calcified muscle mass (so much muscle death occurred in three weeks… 60% of her muscle died…) but we went back to the orthopedic surgeon to decide what our range of options were. He said he obviously couldn’t be positive that it wasn’t a tumor but he just couldn’t imagine a three year old dog with a bone tumor.

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* i wanted to focus this entry on everything leading up to the day we saw the orthopedic surgeon.
everything after then kind of happened all at once
(within 24 hours of her diagnosis we had completed her amputation)
it will all be included in it’s own post *

I had to clear my first post in order to ensure that my blog does not look ridiculous. Today is May 28th, and in seven hours my three year old princess Eva goes in to have her right rear leg amputated. I plan on posting an updated blog post later on, with some scans and more information on our situation.

I am so grateful for all of you already.