A miscellany for a cloudy day

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

First of all, considering the situation in Haiti, I can't urge you strongly enough to go to thehungersite.com and click on the "click to give" box, and then do the same at The Animal Rescue Site (use the tab at the top of the Hunger Site page, or click on the icon to the right of this page).  Your clicks produce funds for both causes -- the advertisers' money goes directly to help.  It's free, but if you can afford to make a donation you'll find all the information you need to do so.

When I was looking for information to help Tony fight his cancer, I missed a terrific resource, and I'm sort of appalled at myself, since it's part of Dogtime.  Go to http://dogtime.com/canine-cancer.html for a wealth of information on all kinds of canine cancer.  They also have articles on canine diabetes.

Yesterday was my first day back to work after the semester break, and I was very surprised when a colleague asked me if I had gotten a new dog yet.  In fact, I think my jaw dropped for a moment.  I've already decided that I want to wait until I'm in a better financial position.  It's going to take a while to recover from the costs of Tony's last year. 

Speaking of which, every time my four-year-old niece has visited since Tony died she has asked where he is.  Each time this has happened, I've explained things to her.  However, she was over the day before yesterday, and I finally realized what was going on.  This time she asked in front of her father, who asked her, "Where do you think he is, Caroline?"  She thought for a moment, then she said that Tony was with Bogie and Grandpa, meaning that he was in heaven.  Alex said, "that's right."  She seemed satisfied; what she was trying to do, I guess, was to get confirmation of this idea.  We'll see if she asks again next time she's over.

My diabetic dog has cancer

Image via Wikipedia. "Cytology from a needle aspiration biopsy of a lymph node of a dog with lymphoma. The predominant cells are lymphoblasts. Slide was stained with a modified Wright's stain."

I had to use that as the title for this post, just because it's so hard to say. Today, Tony is wide awake, walking around the way he usually does first thing in the morning. We call this "checking the perimeter," since it does look like that's what he's doing. He wants to know where everyone is; once he knows that, he settles down for a little snooze. It all seems totally routine, but with one look at him, anybody could tell that something's wrong. He had his stitches from the biopsy removed on Wednesday and started Prednisone on Thursday (the wait time from the diagnosis was caused by his taking Rimadyl; he needed to be off it for at least a week before they could give him Prednisone, as the two interact badly, apparently). Dr. Kroll warned me that he would be very hungry and thirsty on the Prednisone, and so it has worked out. Yesterday, he emptied his breakfast and dinner bowls on the first try, which he has never done before (he likes to leave a bit for a snack). This isn't a bad thing, since he's been losing weight (now just over 8 lb.). I had even been cutting back his insulin a bit before this as he wasn't eating as much as usual, what with the change in his food (more about this later)

As to what I've been doing since the diagnosis, you can probably guess. After I finished my last post, I began researching lymphoma in dogs, looking not just at peer-reviewed veterinary journal articles, but also at what ordinary people had to say about their experiences. I felt better once I had done this; it got rid of some of the helplessness I had been feeling. And I found some interesting stuff.

The first thing I discovered is that when this happens to your best friend, you want to talk about it. There are a lot of web pages devoted to dogs who have had lymphoma, along with the stories of their treatment. There are also, as you might expect, pages and sites that are trying to sell you something. I tried to weed out as much of this as I could, but a couple were actually useful. One of these is by a guy named Ted Schneck, who is selling a book titled Curing Canine Cancer: Natural Treatments That Work (Secrets of Marty the Wonderdog). No, I did not buy the book; as I've mentioned before, I'm broke. I've already spent over a quarter of my annual income on Tony's care this year, and I can't even afford to consult with a veterinary oncologist. However, Ted seems to want to help: even if you aren't buying the book, he has free tips that he will e-mail. Of course, that gives him more chances to make his sales pitch, but I didn't mind because a couple of the tips were very helpful to me. One of them was to encourage me to take a "shotgun approach," trying anything that might help as long as it doesn't hurt. I was already leaning in that direction, but the validation, even from a layperson, made me feel that I was doing the right thing for Tony. The other thing was even better; it had to do with my behavior around Tony, and I'll explain that in a later post. In fact, I'll talk about all of these issues in individual posts, I think.

I guess I'll give Ted a plug, since he did me a favor. His url is http://www.curing-canine-cancer.com/.