The house is now too quiet, and I can barely bring myself to walk downstairs into what was her domain. Saturday afternoon I could have sworn that I heard her sit up on her couch to peer over the back as I made my way down the steps. She wasn’t there, though.

Thursday morning she had one of her weekly checkups with the girls at the vet. It kind of went as expected: she was coming out of remission, due [in my mind] to the fact that during the previous chemo session she couldn’t have the ‘good’ drug, having reached her lifetime limit on it — it’s one of those drugs that can wreck havoc if given more than six times over the course of a dog’s life — and the substitute drug just wasn’t up to snuff. So the doctor went over the [dwindling] treatment options, and sent everyone on their merry way with an appointment scheduled for Tuesday.

Thursday night during dinner Puppy had a couple of very brief spasm-y, seizure-y things. Brief, but worrisome — but otherwise, she seemed fine. A little more quiet than usual, maybe, if anything. She laid with us in the living room as we watched the hockey game, and afterward took up her favorite position on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. As I sat in the living room watching whatever after-game program was on, I heard her stand up and take a few steps up the stairs. I leaned over to look down the stairs at her just in time to see another seizure send her backwards and her head hit off the wall, and I flew down. We sat on the landing for a while with her head in my lap, and then when I got up for something-or-other, she moved to a cozier spot behind our bar. I resumed my duty as headrest, and we stayed there until my mom came down. I couldn’t shake my bad feelings, and as we laid there, I begged Puppy in a whisper to make it through the night.

Friday morning I woke up to a terrible look on my mom’s face. The seizures had gotten worse overnight, becoming more frequent and more severe. Puppy was laying under a desk in our game room, and didn’t even thump her tail in recognition when I went to see her. My mom was on the phone with the vet, and we opted to take her in for emergency services instead of waiting for a late-morning oncology appointment. Normally hyper-enthusiastic about trips to the vet and any car-related adventures, we had to lift her up and carry her out to the truck, and halfway there, she seized in my arms.

Three hours later, my sisters, parents and I have gathered in a back room, waiting for the techs to bring Puppy in so we can say goodbye. The cancer had spread to her brain, the doctors think, and there was very little to be done. As we sat there, we exchanged stories, and we came to realize that somehow, the day before, we’d given Puppy all of her favorite things. She’d laid outside in the sunshine with my sister during the day, and she’d had a variety of her favorite treats. Thursday night, I took Puppy outside and we chased a rabbit all around the house, sat in the yard, and I fed her a few choice blades of grass. We had pizza for dinner that night, and she feasted on pizza bones [the crusts] and had an imitation ice cream treat for dessert.

One of our favorite girls at the vet game in with a clipboard and some forms, and being both closest to her and used to filling out the paperwork, I automatically reached for it. Turns out it was the authorization for euthanasia. I have never wanted to sign my name less in my life.

They brought her in and we began our goodbyes, and I was relieved to see her pick up her head in recognition at our voices. I selfishly wanted to delay the inevitable as long as possible, but when another seizure took her — the worst that I’d seen so far — I knew we’d have to let her go before yet another one hit. Saying goodbye was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done.

I keep looking for her. But she’s not there to greet me when I walk in the house after work, and she’s not scratching on the bathroom door when I’m getting ready in the morning, and she’s not jumping on my bed to bark at the neighbors and get her fur all over my work clothes.

Puppy never judged me, was never disappointed when I didn’t go to grad school, never questioned my bad decisions. She seemed to love me unconditionally, and I can only hope that she knew how much I loved her. How much we all loved her. How much we’re going to miss her.

In loving memory
September 2004 — May 2009

—–

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.

—–

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.

Since she’s not been off of the Wisconsin Protocol very long, it was recommended to us by our oncologist that she not resume that same course of treatment. Instead, we’re going to try a drug called Lomustine, or CCNU. The nice part about this drug is that it’s given every three weeks instead of weekly [though we will have to go back in between treatments for a blood check] and it’s in pill form and will be given orally — no more IVs and strangely shaved legs for now.

Here’s hoping it works!

[cross-posted to this site's 'about' page.]

I have a massive pile of books in my room. They all sit there, unread, while I go and, well, buy more books. I know it’s a problem, so I tried to do something about it. For 2008 I resolved to read every single book that I bought. And that didn’t happen, because there are just too many books out there and I have too little restraint. Now that my ‘to be read’ pile is becoming a ‘to be read’ mountain, I’ve decided that I needed to really do something about it.

So I decided that this year — 2009 — I’m not going to allow myself to buy a single book. I know, crazy, right? But because I know how seriously I lack willpower, I added a motivational twist to my mission: for every book that I read this year I’m going to set aside five dollars. Initially I planned to take the money that I’ve set aside and splurge on something major with it — for instance, the limited edition of Les Misérables published by the Folio Society, or maybe an Amazon Kindle. And then I changed my mind.

The current love of my life is my four-year-old German Shepherd. In 2007 she was diagnosed with exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, and in 2008 she was diagnosed with high-grade canine lymphoma. Both could have taken a more serious toll on her, but thanks to modern veterinary medicine and the help of some wonderful people on the Internet, both are currently under control and my darling girl is once again a bouncy, playful pup.

So at the beginning of 2010, I plan to make donations to two charitable organizations: the Canine Genetics Research group at Texas A&M University to support their EPI research and the Animal Care and Assistance Fund, a new, non-profit extension of the Pittsburgh Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center, a practice that took outstanding care of my pup during her chemotherapy regimen.

I plan on using this site as both a record of my efforts and as a form of motivation — the more that I’m semi-publicly accountable for, the better. I’d like to post my thoughts on what I read and possibly even get feedback and suggestions from anyone who might stop by. For a while, everything here will be a work in progress, but hopefully it’ll all come together eventually.