Showing posts with label The Lone Met. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Lone Met. Show all posts

July 20, 2011

No Contest

Plotting evil in Ab's lung
Well... the follow up x-ray was not great. The Met formerly known as Lone has (a) gotten bigger and (b) found himself a little buddy, or a girlfriend, or a little sibling, or whatever the hell it is. So we won't be having a "Rename the Lone Met" contest. For now I'm just calling them Boris and Natasha (unless someone has a better suggestion), and even though Natasha was bigger than Boris in Rocky and Bullwinkle, I'm going to think of the bigger met as Boris, since in my opinion he was always the nastier piece of work.

Dr. V. said that it could be worse, and that Abby could still have a decent amount of time left, but it's still not good news. He said he was really not expecting to see another met. He was getting a little red-eyed as well as he told me all this. :( 

He said, overall, considering how crappy and aggressive this disease is, she's still doing good. She feels great still: has great energy and a good appetite (well, as good as it's ever been, which has never been great; she's just not a big eater). Also, her lungs and heart sound really good - no sign of strain on the heart or fluid in the lungs. Her blood work was also fine. He said there is no sign of mets anywhere else in her lungs and Natasha looks to be a chip off Boris (they are sort of nestled right up against each other). And he said that, as mets go, Boris has grown pretty slowly. We first saw Boris back in December, and now 7 months later he's about the size of a golf ball. (That sounds big to me, but Dr. V said that because of where it is, it can get really big before it starts to be a problem.)

Hopefully the new pills (the Artemix, which is the hollistic thing we just started her on last week) will make some difference. We have to give them to her every night and then in 2 months do another x-ray to see if they are helping at all. It could happen that they would make a difference... So all hope is going into that now.

He also said that if we wanted to try to be more aggressive, we could try another type of IV chemo, which would not cure her, but would maybe slow things down. I don't think we'll do that... I think instead we'll hope for the Artemix to do its thing, but I'll have to talk to her pop about that. 

In a bit of good news, the "Dog Days of Summer" contest is going well! Abby is already into triple digits with her votes! Not bad for being in the contest a mere 24 hours. You can vote more than once, so if you have a sec, click on the picture below and vote for her.


In the grand scheme of this fricking disease, I know we've actually been kind of lucky. Some folks don't get to have their doggies with them this long after diagnosis, or don't get to have them be so energetic. It's nice that she still feels fine and her body has no clue that she is sick. Hanging on to that, and hanging on to hope for the Artemix. Come on, Artemix! Do your thing, Artemix!



July 19, 2011

Votes & Something More Important

Abby's pic is up in the Union Tribune Dog Days of Summer photo contest. (Hopefully this voting widget thing works... You should be able to just click on it and vote for her.) It says you can vote once per hour, so have at it! Voting is open until July 29th.


As you can see, I went with the life guard picture. Counting the votes on the site and via email resulted in the watermelon pic edging out the life guard pic by one vote - that is, if Lou the Corgi's vote counts (which of course it does around here!). But (even though I personally prefer the watermelon pic) I thought this one would print up better in the paper. Not that it will actually make it to the paper... I was paging through the competition, just to see what sort of vote numbers others have so far, and some people are really cranking the votes. The dumb thing is that there is no official judging, so they may end up with winning pics that have no relation to summer. The photo I saw with the most votes is a blurry picture of a dog "driving" a car. What does that have to do with summer? Maybe if she was cruising the beach, but no, she's just sitting in the driver's seat. 

Anyway, more important than voting even is the fact that we need your crossed fingers/paws, good vibes, prayers, pagan rituals, whatever you are into so that Abby will have a good follow up x-ray tomorrow. I'm a little nervous about it. I hate sitting in the room alone while they whisk Abby to the back. Then I have to wait and wait, and then try to guess what the look on Dr. V's face means when he opens the door to have me come in the back and look at the x-ray with him. Last time he had a cold, and he sounded all choked up when he said "Come take a look" and I about had a heart attack - but it was just his stupid sore throat, and the Lone Met was still a loner. If it's still a loner tomorrow (oh pleeeeeze) we'll have a re-name the Lone Met contest. 

Will post an update tomorrow after her appointment. In the meantime, Abby got two new bandanas. She'd never worn a bandana before. Didn't realize she would tolerate one, but she looks darn cute in them! Especially the pink one, which was an 8-month ampuversary present from her cousin, Nick, and his girlfriend, Tee. (But really mostly Tee...) The other one is a "Tripawds Rule" bandana from the tripawds.com site. Stylish, eh?

Contemplating life...or maybe just a bug
Watching the sunset through the sage.
In other news, Mike brought home this ridiculously huge trophy the other day after winning the "first annual" badminton tournament at work. (Which is amusing because the stupid thing is bigger than the soccer trophy for the Women's World Cup and because he hasn't played badminton in, oh, about a decade or more.) 
Should have drunk champagne out of it while we had the chance.
Not quite the same, but easier to dust.
Luckily it turned out the BIG trophy will be a perpetual one, so it went back to the office, and we get this little commemorative one for home: 

Thanks in advance for the votes and the good vibes for Ab!

April 27, 2011

No New Mets!!!

Abby had her follow-up x-ray today, and while the results weren't miraculous (no, unfortunately the lone met did not disappear...) they were still pretty darn good: that lone met is STILL a loner. None of his rat-bastard friends have come to join the party! Hoorah! Hopefully he STAYS a loner... although I guess that's kind of a long shot. Dr. V. said it's very rare to have just one met--I guess they are like potato chips or something. 

The slightly bad news was that the Lone Met (I've decided to start capitalizing that...sorta like he's the evil villain in a B Western...) had gotten a little bigger in the almost-three-months since the last x-ray. He went from 1.0cm to ~ 1.4cm. The good news is that The Lone Met lives in a "good" spot in her lungs. Apparently the location of the mets can have a big impact on longevity, for instance you don't want them up by the airways. Our Lone Met is hanging out in sort of the "back country" of Abby's lungs, so nowhere near up where all the action is. Phew. 

Dr. V. says if we keep doing what we are doing with her metronomic therapy (maintaining her every-other-day doses of Palladia/Cytoxan) we should have her around for "a good long time." Which, with osteosarcoma, is still not THAT long in the grand scheme of things, and it's impossible to really put a number on these things, but... there is a dog on the Tripawds site who is on metronomic protocol, AND has lung mets (plural) and has been going for 2 years that way! Another two years (at least) would be awesome. 

And, I ask you, does this look like a sick dog??? 
[No animals - or humans - were harmed in the making of this video, although all three of us did end up quite wet.]


Oh, one other thing... Mike was asking, Why can't we just cut that damn Lone Met out? Dr. V. did address that -- it is possible that we could cut it out, but it's pretty rare to do because it's not worth it unless the dog meets three criteria: (1) the met has to be stable (it can grow some, but not a ton -- as it is now, he said we could actually call her met "stable," so check on that one), (2) it has to be a Lone Met (check), and (3) it has to remain a Lone Met for a year (so, we need to keep waiting and see what happens). We'll see if we make it to another six months and The Lone Met still rides alone. It's pretty major surgery, so I dunno... Hopefully we'll someday be at a point where we need to make that decision. 

P.S. She is still having minor diarrhea (still not entirely a "solid citizen") so we are on a little break from her meds until her system settles down again. Hopefully she'll be back into her routine very shortly.