I Fucking Hate Cancer

Sorry for the language in this family-friendly blog, but, well, deal with it.

Because I fucking hate cancer.

Goldie's is back. Freakin' A.

We have been diligent about checking for another tumor growth. Mike, even more than me, gives her complete rub downs at least once a day -- which you can imagine she absolutely adores.

So imagine our surprise when we came home Friday night after the Caps game, and there was one. motherf&%*ing. huge. tumor.

I had been gone for several hours. That's it. I was home all day Friday. I don't remember giving her a complete tummy rub on Friday, but I had pet her, and walked her, and watched as she lay spread out in the kitchen while I worked.

And yet, there it was.

I had hoped (a bad hope, I know) on Friday night that maybe it was just really, really bad constipation. I took her out, and she did her business -- no issues.

We decided to sleep on it. Maybe Saturday morning she'd get cleared out.

Only not only was it still there Saturday morning, it had gotten slightly bigger, and redder (the vet later called this "bruising" due to slight internal bleeding around the tumor).

It's probably a little smaller than a baseball. A racquetball ball size.  Here, I'm trying to put my hand around it to show the size:

We went to the vet, they did a quick biopsy, and confirmed our worst fear. The cancer is back.

If you recall from this summer, what Goldie had was a mast cell tumor. Here's more about mast cell tumors (I admit to not knowing the background of this website, but everything this site said when I read it over the summer was seconded by our vet, so I think it's a pretty good summary if you're interested).

Goldie had a high grade 2 -- they thought the cancer was confined to the tumor, but the cells in the tumor were extremely active. They removed the tumor, tests showed they got good margins and x-rays showed no more cancer.

But we were warned. High grade 2 was bad, with a likelihood of it coming back. And if it came back, that'd be bad. Plus, she didn't handle the surgery too well. It took her several days to recover fully from the anesthesia, and she was in a lot of pain. She was confused. It was awful.

When we discovered that it was the cancer again on Saturday, we took her home. The vet who saw her (not our usual ... who unfortunately is out of town until the 22nd!!!) recommended keeping her overnight. We said, "why?" She said so they could observe it, and then if we decided to do surgical removal, they could get the tests and meds going for that.

We leashed her up and headed out.

The vet is a scary place. I know she stays in a crate when she's in the back, and I know she hates it. We didn't think there was a need for that kind of stress just so they could observe it.

Especially since we had a fun day planned for her over at Bobby and Kristy's, with their two dogs and huge back yard. No. She has cancer. Let her have some fun.

Not to mention... the surgery. That was a big question. One we had pretty much answered in our minds that we didn't want to have it.

I made an appointment for Monday with our second-favorite vet to find out more about what this could mean. The size, the growth, what happens if we don't remove it. Is this a new tumor or did the one from the summer metastasize? Does the answer to that question even matter? Will this spread? If we don't treat, will it be a fast deterioration, or can she live with the tumor for months, even a year?

So we went to the vet today, and sat for over an hour past our appointment date to see the vet. Has never happened at this animal hospital before, but of course it would happen today.

The vet comes in and almost immediately announces, "I don't really know much about mast cell cancer, so I think you need to seen an oncologist to answer any questions you have."

And basically that was the extent of the conversation, though over the next 30 minutes we asked our questions in various ways, and she told stories of the one time she had treated a mast cell tumor before.

She also, though, had these vastly different assumptions about the tumor than we had going in. And I don't know if it's just different vets, and their different bed side manners, or that our "usual" vet also happens to be a surgeon, or what. But while our usual vet stressed the high grade part of high grade 2 tumor this summer, and how bad that was, the vet today kept referring to it as "a 2 -- at least it wasn't a 3."

She also kept going on about the possibility (and she stressed possibility, saying she didn't know what treatment there was for a mast cell other than surgery) of drugs that could shrink it -- not radiation, just plain old pills. She even thinks that racquetball sized tumor may shrink with Benadryl... Benadryl! ... which only makes sense because of all we now know about mast cells and that they cause a natural histamine release in the dog.

I felt like today's meeting was a huge yellow light, and I couldn't help but leave frustrated. Why couldn't the vet on Saturday have said from the start that with the recurrence of the tumor, it was outside the scope of the practice's expertise?

The vet today did instill in us that a day... a week... even a month wouldn't make much difference in the treatment option of the tumors, especially if we were already leaning toward non-invasive means. (Again, different from several months ago, when upon finding the tumor, we were told to schedule the next possible surgery date.) That was reassuring if only because we have a planned trip next week to Las Vegas and LA for a wedding that suddenly became seriously in peril.

Tomorrow I begin trying to make an appointment with an oncologist.

I fucking hate cancer.