We found out yesterday evening that blind Callie does indeed have a brain tumor. A large one. In this vertical view of her head from the CAT scan image, it's the bright glowing thing at the base of her brain at the front end. (The dark area in the center of her brain is the cerebral fluid.)
That's the bad news. The good news is that our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Dave Bostwick, believes radiation therapy offers some real hope. When I drove back into Missoula late yesterday to pick up Callie after the scan, Dave told me, "Her blood work is perfect, she's in otherwise excellent health, and given her breed, she could easily live another three years. So I think she's an excellent candidate for radiation therapy." (We don't know how old she is, but our working assumption is that she may be around 12.)
Dave said that her tumor is most likely a meningioma, which are generally benign — and if you can shrink it down with radiation, you relieve the pressure inside the brain that is triggering the seizures. He said that oncologists generally have a high success rate treating these kinds of brain tumors with radiation.
So Dave has a call into the oncologist at Washington State University's veterinary teaching hospital this morning to find out about the cost and other details of the treatment. We'll keep you posted.
In the meantime, after I got home last night with Callie, she ate her dinner and then methodically began going around the house, grooming her "clients" like blind Briggs. She was a little put-out with us because she had all these grooming appointments scheduled for yesterday but spent the day in the clinic instead. She tried to make up for it after dinner with some "speed grooming." (I think that's like speed-dating, just different.)
To see a larger version of the scan, click on the image.
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