Outside A Dog

To explain my extended absence, I offer this, cross-posted from my more personal site.

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So.

I’ll admit to putting off writing this for as long as possible, because putting the last couple of weeks into words is going to force me to mentally relive it, and I’m not thrilled with the idea.

Basically, the short version of it all is this: we were thisclose to losing the Puppy last week. Things were so dire that her oncologist called to ask about ‘heroic measures’ [CPR and anything else needed to resuscitate should the unthinkable happen], and our favorite vet tech [the lovely and appropriately named Kat] spent a portion of her shift just sitting with our girl with Puppy’s head in her lap, all while imploring our vet to call us to tell us how bad things really were.

The good news is that she is — ever so slowly — on the mend.

Back in January, my mom and I noticed that the lymph nodes in Puppy’s neck were once again notably enlarged. We made the trek to see the oncologist and were informed that her lymphoma had come out of remission and given three or four new treatment options. We were able to start one of them right then and there, so that’s what we picked, and for a while, everything was good. Her lymph nodes decreased in size, and she was all bouncy and playful and mostly normal.

Cut to the appointment two weeks ago [on a Thursday] when we found out the the new drug was no longer working and we have to pick another kind of chemo. Puppy’s kind of wheezy because of the enlarged nodes in her neck, and kind of quiet, but pretty okay. Our oncologist advised us to come in sometime the next week ["Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, whenever's good for you, a day either way won't really matter"] for our next treatment of choice. We scheduled an early appointment for Tuesday because the chemo would take eight+ hours to deliver by IV.

When I left the house Saturday for Krystal’s bachelorette extravaganza — two days later — everything seemed okay. When I came home Sunday morning, Puppy was quiet and kind of picking at her food. It took her just about all day to eat her breakfast, and wasn’t nearly as obnoxious as she usually is — no bouncing me awake, no barking out the window at the neighbors. Monday she wasn’t better at all, but Tuesday was a nightmare.

Tuesday morning we made our way to the vet in a bit of a panic — and once we got in the front door, Puppy laid down on the tile floor and refuse to move. When Kat the Tech came out to collect Puppy for her treatment, my mom and I were in tears, Puppy still wouldn’t get up off the floor, and Kat, another tech, and I had to lift her up and carry her to an exam room. After that, everything pretty much kicked into crisis mode. Puppy was whisked away on a gurney, and my mom and I had no choice but to head to work and wait for the phone to ring — and panic a little bit lot each time it did.

Tuesday was the day of the ‘heroic measures’ phone call, and I was trying to hold out hope that I’d still have a Puppy by the end of the day. In the end, no news was good news, and when we finally heard from the oncologist again after work, well, the news wasn’t great, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. The vet told us she’d call overnight if anything happened, but again, to consider no news to be good news. When I woke up Wednesday morning and realized the phone hadn’t rung overnight, I felt such relief.

Wednesday night we were allowed to go and visit her, and I was amazed by how much she’d improved overnight. She still wasn’t 100% — more like 60%, maybe — but the improvement was incredible. She was refusing to eat, but did manage to pull a couple of catheters out of her legs, so she had a little bit of spirit, at least.

Late Thursday afternoon we got the okay to bring her home — along with nine kinds of drugs. Several antibiotics, eye drops and ointments [for the lymph that had made its way into her eyes], an appetite stimulant, and some anti-nausea drugs, among other things. And Friday, she was kind of okay. Not great, but okay. We coerced her into eating some baby food [straight from the jar, no spoons or airplane noises necessary] and shoved some pills down her throat and crossed our fingers. But the pills didn’t stay down — hardly anything did. Shortly after that, we couldn’t tempt her with any kind of food, she had near constant diarrhea, and nothing would stay in her stomach. Sunday my mom and I packed her back into the truck and met with one of the vets with the emergency service. Several hours hours, some IV fluids, and some [bigger, better, stronger] anti-nausea drugs later, we were sent on our way — this time with injectable medications to replace the pills that Puppy couldn’t keep down.

That night, Puppy had a couple of sleepover buddies: she and I claimed the couch, and my mom slept nearby on a recliner in preparation for the hourly trips to the backyard and the 4am anti-nausea injections. I settled in with her around 1am, and that’s about when she decided that she wanted to eat. Things were looking up.

By Monday night the vomiting had ceased completely, though the constant, oozing diarrhea hadn’t cleared up. Sometime in the wee hours of Tuesday morning it took on a bloody tinge and I steeled myself to tell my mom that I didn’t think we could wait until Puppy’s 1pm checkup with the vet. And let me tell you about the panic that I had to fight — flashes of all sorts of things went through my mind: internal bleeding, organ failure, all kinds of horrible things.

Somehow, we managed to hold out until 1pm, and we were escorted into an exam room and Puppy was taken back into the lab for some blood work. We waited, and waited, and then Puppy came to wait with us. And then we waited some more. When her oncologist walked in, my heart was in my throat, and it stayed there until she told us that Puppy’s blood tests had some back mostly normal. A couple of things were low — her platelets and white blood cell count, so more antibiotics, yay — but the rest of the numbers that had been sky high a week previously– her liver functions, for example — has come back down into normal range. Better news came in the form of a reassurance that the blood we were seeing was a result of the low platelets and nothing to worry about just yet. Best news came in the form of the announcement that all of her lymph nodes — including the ones in her liver that had caused much of this mess — have come down to normal size and Puppy is in partial-to-complete remission.

Talk about a huge sigh of relief.

We’re still working on her. She’s only recently [as of this morning] eating regularly again, and she’s not quite bouncing on me in the morning, but she did come and give me kisses, instead. She’s still on eleven kinds of medicine, but there aren’t any more 4am injections. She’s still quiet, and she’s still sick, but she’s still around. And we’ll take it.

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Add to this mess the fact that my boss was on vacation, my best friend got married [and I was a bridesmaid] and my boyfriend moved to Philadelphia, all in the same span of three weeks or so. It’s not a great excuse, but it’s all I’ve got.

Hope to resume regular bookish stuff soon.