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Wednesday was the oncology exam and things were pretty much as I expected. The one thing I didn’t know was that the tumor could grow to the point it’s inoperable and amputation would be the only option available. That might change things a bit as I’d hoped to put off surgery for as long as possible so as to not start the “regrowth clock” until as late as possible.

She also said that this particular kind of tumor puts out “tentacles” into surrounding tissue, so that when they excise it, they try to take a good bit of the surrounding tissue to try to get it all. But as it’s located on his foot, there isn’t very much surrounding tissue, so that’s probably not possible and the surgeon concurred. If they can get it all, radiation has an 80%-90% cure rate at 5 years. If they can’t get it all, radiation has a 50% non-growth at one year (meaning, the tumor won’t be any bigger at the end of one year). That doesn’t sound like much of an option to me, and the vet seemed to agree. If they don’t get it all, the tumor will most likely grow back, but it will take 6-12 months to do so. If radiation is added, the place we’ll be at the end of 12 months seems to be little different.

Again, I’m impressed with Angell Memorial. I’ve gotten better service there than with my own doctor. They even give you an estimate of costs right up front. Who has ever heard of that for people medicine? I haven’t.

So I have, really, only one decision to make, and that is when to have the surgery.

As I said, I’d like to put it off as long as possible, but there was another spanner thrown into the works. He’s got another tumor in his neck. It may turn out to be nothing more than another of those old-dog fatty deposits, but it may not. It feels a bit different than the others. It will take an ultrasound to find out exactly what it is, and that should probably be done sooner rather than later. It’s very mobile, but feels different. She said that if it’s not a fatty deposit, the location suggests it’s related to either the jugular or carotid (I forget which) or the thyroid. She didn’t want to aspirate it as thyroid tumors bleed like crazy.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Dogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.