Rolling Dog Farm Blog

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about blind Goldie having a second round of cancer surgery to remove a mast cell tumor.  The surgery went fine, but the biopsy results came back with both good news and bad news.  The good news was the tumor was a moderate Grade 2.  The bad news was that we didn’t have clean margins, meaning that some of the cancerous tissue might still be there.  These kinds of tumors are basically impossible to see during surgery, so the surgeon removes as much tissue around the suspect area as possible and hopes he or she gets it all.  The biopsy gives the answer.

In Goldie’s case, our internal medicine specialist in Missoula, Dr. Dave Bostwick, had taken out a big chunk of her tissue during surgery, right down to the abdominal wall.  He had warned us about the possibility of not getting it all, so we were prepared for the news when he called with the biopsy results.  Dave said we had three options:  more surgery; chemotherapy; or do nothing further, since it was a slow-growing Grade 2, Goldie is 11 years old, and we had a reasonable chance of the tumor not becoming lethal before she died of old age.

Our natural inclination is to be very aggressive and intervene medically, but we didn’t want to put her through another surgery.  It just seems that the more surgeries an animal goes through, the higher the risk for post-operative complications — and Birdie’s tragic death still haunts us.  And Dave had already removed so much of her chest tissue in the initial surgery we hated to think how much more he’d have to take out. 

Doing nothing did not sit well with us either, since she’s already had two bouts of cancer this year alone, so it seemed to us she had a fairly high risk of this tumor rebounding aggressively.  Moreover, who knows how long she may live?  We’re going to plan on — we’re going to will it — for her to live to 17.

I talked with Dave last week about the chemotherapy option.  The chemo drug is called vinblastine, and Dave said he has never had a dog get sick from it.  He said it’s commonly used for this purpose — "margin clean-up" for mast cell tumors.  She would get one intravenous injection each week for four weeks, then every other week for four weeks … a total of eight rounds of treatment. 

That’s the option Alayne and I selected, and today I took Goldie in to see Dave for her first round of chemo.  In these photos Dave’s vet tech Tracy is holding Goldie still while Dave administers the drug. 

A few hours later, back at the ranch, Goldie is doing great and just happy to be home — though she liked riding around Missoula in the truck, too!

(Speaking of these photos, please notice the nice arrangement of yellow-ish pastel colors — shirts, hair, walls, floor and the dog, too.  Clearly there was a theme today.)