My sweet old girl won't be with us much longer
Last week when we went to my mom's house for Thanksgiving, she was almost unable to get up and didn't want to eat until we broke out the fried chicken. Thursday, she was back to herself so I decided not to rush her to the vet on Black Friday after all but rather wait until I could take her with me on Monday (I work there). I figured she was probably fine, but she had seemed a bit pot-bellied to me for a few weeks and she was breathing a little more rapidly as of late. She needed a CBC, heartworm test, and blood chemistries to make sure she was ok to take her pain meds anyway (she has hip dysplasia, bad arthritis in the elbows, and spinal arthritis too) and her doctor wanted to do an x-ray to check for spondylosis of the spine and rule out bladder stones since she's been leaking urine for the past month or two (which I figured was just from her spinal arthritis impinging on the nerves back there). Her chems were fine, but her CBC showed that she was anemic and the area of the spleen was hazy on the x-ray. So she went back in on Tuesday for an abdominal ultrasound. The ultrasound showed a mass in her spleen and free fluid in the abdomen. There's no way of knowing for sure without doing a biopsy, but given that she is a 12-13 year old german shepherd the most likely diagnosis is a hemangiosarcoma and with fluid in the abdomen it has probably spread already. Without surgery, she has 1-3 months. With surgery alone, she has 1-3 months. With surgery and chemo we might be able to extend that to 6-12 months but it could seriously decrease the quality of those months (and there's no way we can afford it even if we wanted to). I think I'm still in denial (I remember when the vet was talking to me that I was focusing on her purple turtleneck more than I should have been) and it has just started to really sink in. Thankfully, Aina is still very happy and feels great. So we're left to spoil her rotten (she actually has a doctor's note that says she can eat whatever she wants to eat
) for whatever time she has left. Suddenly all the little things she does that annoy me don't seem to bother me anymore...
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