ginger's cancer

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

ginger

Our beautiful, sweet Ginger died today around 6:30 p.m. A few days ago we had some hope, but she took a turn for the worse and the last couple of nights she had trouble breathing and couldn’t sleep and we realized it just wasn’t fair to her to make her suffer any longer. The lymph nodes in her neck were choking her and she could barely walk and was just so unhappy.

It was so hard to say goodbye. Stanley and I stayed with her until she died. Her vet, Meredith Re, was as she always has been, kind and supportive.

It hurts. I miss her.

This is our last photo of her, Stanley took it today after she’d finished eating her Greenie, her favorite food:

We were hoping to take her to Three Mile Beach in Oscoda for one last swim—we were hoping she’d be okay for just another month, but the lymphoma and the torn ligament were just too much. She was such a good dog.

posted by lee on 08/19/08 at 07:27 PM
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Sunday, July 20, 2008

try to keep a chowhound from eating ...

We brought Ginger home about 5:30 on Saturday. What a difference—Friday we had to nearly carry her in and Saturday she was wagging her tail and lively and very happy to jump in the car.

They wanted to keep her longer, to try feeding her and seeing what happens. But Dr. Re said Ginger should go home as soon as possible since she is so nervous when she’s away from us. So they let us pick her up and sent instructions home for feeding her, with instructions to bring her back if she can’t keep food down or gets diarrhea again. The doctor at the hospital wanted to do a full ultrasound, which we weren’t too keen on unless it’s necessary. Dr. Re told them not to do one unless we had to bring her back, when they would need one to get a final diagnosis—which, right now, is chemo-induced illness and not something like pancreatitis or renal or liver pathology.

Her diet is supposed to consist of rice and boiled chicken sans skin or fat or spices of any kind. And we can feed her oatmeal. We’re supposed to do this for five to seven days. She is not happy about this. She inhaled her first meal at home: a cup of brown rice and a chicken thigh. We gave her another thigh while we ate dinner. She then spent the next couple of hours trying to get us to put her dog chow back down so she could eat it—she parks herself beneath whatever it is she wants and kind of huffs at us until we give in (we didn’t give in. Yet.)

And she’s not allowed to have a Greenie yet. Greenies make her very happy. When Jeopardy comes on and she hears the sounds made while listing the categories at the beginning of the show, that’s her cue, “oh happy happy joy joy it’s Greenie time ... ” Fortunately, Jeopardy isn’t on again until Monday.

So far, so good. Her lymph glands have done down considerably, probably due to the steroid injections she got in lieu of the prednisone, but it makes it easier for her to breathe. She’s still very tired, but not lethargic: she’s interested in what’s going on but is too tired to chase Slink yet. And she reeks—so it’s a bath on Sunday.

Since she didn’t stay for two days, we actually got some money back from our “deposit,” not a lot, but some. We asked if we could just contribute it to a fund for people who don’t any money to pay their pet hospital bill and they were very pleased to do this.

What’s weird is seeing the shaved areas on her foreleg and hind leg where they inserted catheters and IV tubes or whatever. We hadn’t realized they done this so were a little shocked when we took off the bandage.

She gets another chemo treatment this week—I’m a little nervous about this but trust that her oncologist vet knows what he is doing since the hospital is affiliated with the onco vets’ practice. Or her onco vet works there, or something.

I’m just happy that she’s home again and we have her for a while longer.

posted by lee on 07/20/08 at 01:40 AM
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Saturday, July 19, 2008

ginger meets a new set of doggie doctors

The cancer protocol the onco vets put Ginger on a couple of weeks ago just didn’t work, and her lymph nodes again started enlarging, which means the lymphoma is back. There is one more chemo protocol they can try, though the prognosis is not good. We’re starting to accept that we won’t have her around much longer, but are hoping she can be comfortable enough for one more trip to Oscoda in late August and early September.

They needed to start her on the first chemo drug they gave her, an induction drug, Elspar. And continue her on Prednisone. Next week she will get blood tests and get checked over, then we start her on yet another drug, but I don’t remember what it is. It’s a pill rather than an injection.

She seemed to be doing okay after treatment on Wednesday. On Thursday, she ate quite well, some wet dog food, a little bit of steak, a bit of baked potato, some broccoli (which she loves—go figure ... ), plus her dog biscuits and her Greenie. Not much of her dog chow. She sometimes gets diarrhea when she eats beef or pork fat (or just beef or pork), so I didn’t think much about it when she had to go out repeatedly starting around 2 am on Friday morning. I was up monitoring a server upgrade anyway, so it wasn’t like I was going to sleep right away. I put newspapers down before I finally went up to bed just in case it wasn’t over.

come back squirrel, i want to play (click to enlarge)

It wasn’t. Only it was much worse—fierce vomiting was the next event. She snagged the cat tuna and blew it. She drank some water—gone at once. Between the vomiting and the diarrhea, I knew it was bad. I called the onco vet, who prescribed some pills to give her, one for each problem. Pills. For a dog that couldn’t even keep water down. A trip to the vet to pick up the scripts and $40 later, I gave her the meds. Barf in 60 seconds. No pills in evidence, but oh she looked so so sick and in pain. The onco vet said to call her regular vet, Dr. Meredith Re at Strawberry Hill Animal Hospital (we’re crazy about Dr. Re, and the creatures love her too, even though she sticks them with needles and shoves thermometers up their butts).

Dr. Re had us bring her in, and it was very difficult because Ginger just did not want to walk anywhere. She got up into the car, but did not want to get out of the car. Stanley had to half pick her up and half shove her out—we didn’t want to yank her by the collar because of her swollen lymph glands. Then, when we finally got her in to the exam room, Ginger shoved her head between the table and the wall and tried to make herself as small as possible.

Bottom line was Ginger needed IV liquids and pretty close supervision overnight at least, since she was dehydrated because of all the liquid she lost—she lost three pounds in two days and only some of it was the lymph fluid going down (they have gotten smaller, but they’re still very much noticeable). Dr. Re’s hospital doesn’t provide ICU-type care and is not staffed during the wee hours, so she recommended we take her to the VCA Veterinary & Emergency Center—the animal ER here in Norwalk. Off we went. Dr. Re was worried that it might be pancreatitis induced by the chemo. We thought, before we saw Dr. Re, that it was all the stuff she ate, or maybe the potato skin poisoned her (they can if they’re green).

Ginger was first “triaged” by an intern? Or orderly? I’m not quite sure who the guy was. We told him that Dr. Re had already called and faxed over her records, seemed rather pointless and a silly procedure—we wanted her taken care of as soon as possible. He left, and soon the vet, Dr. Vaishali Kamath, came in to take a look. I got a good feeling from Dr. Kamath—I felt like I could trust her to take good care of Ginger. The only times Ginger hasn’t been with me are the few days I was in hospital and when we went to Washington DC on our honeymoon, so it was really difficult to leave her there. The vet got her settled in for diagnosis and treatment, and came back to go over the estimate. After leaving $1,500+ to pay for everything (75% of the high-end estimate), we went home to a very quiet house. I asked Stanley if we were crazy for paying so much for a dog who is terminal, and he said, “probably.” I asked if it bothered him and he said, “no.”

Dr. Kamath said, around 11:30 when I finally reached her to get an update (lot of dogs into the ER tonight, but only one from heatstroke), that Ginger was perking up quite a bit, that her blood pressure was back up to closer to where it should be and her blood work was fine except for some abnormalities which the hospital oncologist said was due to her chemo. Lots of IV fluids, IV steroid injection. Her vomiting was stopped, though the diarrhea continues. She is wagging her tail and had just gone out for a walk. We will probably be able to bring her home Saturday—we will hear from the hospital and Dr. Re Saturday morning. Oh, and the vomiting and diarrhea are the result of her chemo and not us letting her eat beef or potato skins. Just a lot of different poisons in her, a lot for her system to handle.

So it seems like she is not ready to go just yet. We’re not ready to let her go yet, either—as long as she is comfortable and seems happy and not in any pain, we’ll hang on to her. The onco vet told us we will know when it’s time to let her die. She’s not under my chair as I write this and the void is huge—I can’t wait to bring her home.

posted by lee on 07/19/08 at 02:14 AM
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Thursday, March 27, 2008

this week’s drug is cytoxan

Ginger is still doing well. Last week’s dose of vincristine—besides turning her doggie farts lethal—lowered her white blood cell count. Not below the cutoff for the next round, but enough so that her onco vet asked us if we wanted to postpone the next treatment for a few days. We opted to go ahead with the cytoxan and feed her antibiotics and keep a close eye on her rather than disrupt the schedule. Since I work at home, I am able to watch over her. And trip over her. She keeps very close to me most of the time.

Cytoxan was administered with a diuretic—Dr. Elpinar told us we had about 20 minutes from the time of treatment to get her home and get her outside to pee. Ginger, of course, kept her own schedule and we had to make her go out. She’s on an antibiotic, half a dose of prednisone, her K-9 Immunity stuff, Omega 3s, and I just added flax seed oil.

Oh, and she overdid it running with Tattoo last Saturday and had a terrible limp for a couple of days, so I added glucosamine chondroitin to the list. The vet told us we shouldn’t give her aspirin while she is on prednisone because it will upset her stomach and gave us a painkiller that is safe with it. Seems to do the trick quite nicely. She isn’t limping any more—she usually does get over it after a couple of days, but this time she hurt so much on Monday that Stanley had to carry her down the stairs. So Tuesday, since she was still limping, Stanley dosed her with the painkiller about a half an hour before I got up so she could go downstairs herself.

The thing that’s making me crazy about this is Ginger has lost five pounds in two weeks. The vet says it’s because it takes a lot out of her to fight the cancer—and I know she’s right, but 5% of her body weight in two weeks seems like a lot to me. She started out at 86.5 pounds and is down to 81.5 pounds. It’s weird to go from worrying about her weighing too much (she was eating Beneful Healthy Weight!) to worrying about whether she’s eating enough to fight her cancer. (If only she could eat lots of Greenies every day—I still haven’t figured out what so addicting to dogs about those things!)

Update on the costs so far: $2,000 (two trips for diagnosis to her vet, intake and three chemo treatments by the oncology vet, K-9 Immunity kits, prednisone, antibiotics, and pain medicine. Oh, and high-end puppy chow, high-protein wet dog food, bones with vitamins, and lots and lots of string cheese. Stop ‘n’ Shop string cheese works best, especially if you take it out of the fridge about 30 minutes before you need it.)

In other news, we had a really nice time over Easter. I was going to use the time to catch up on stuff, but I was just too tired and barely checked my email.

THE CONNECTICUT SCHOOL OF ETIQUETTE REDESIGN
And today we soft-launched the completely redesigned website for The Connecticut School of Etiquette: http://www.morethanmanners.com which I quite like so far. There are some glitches I need to work out and there is more content and photos and a bit of programming to add, but it’s a site the owner can pretty much update herself once she gets the hang of the interface and how it works. Done with ExpressionEngine, of course. The original design we put up quite a while ago—more than five years ago, I think—and while nice, it needed a redesign and needed to be easier to maintain because the owner’s business is expanding.

One of the things I need to do is make the black bar with the etiquette words at the very top of the screen work cross-browser. Looks fine in IE6 or 7, but has this annoying one- or two-pixel border at the top that shows the background pattern through in Firefox and Safari. Not sure yet how to handle this. Border and margin for the body are set to zero, so that shouldn’t even be there—I’ll check various CSS guru sites to see if there’s something I’m not doing that I should be. Every time I think I’ve gotten a handle on CSS, something new that doesn’t work right comes up and I realize I have miles to go—especially since I don’t want to use any hacks.

Friday I’ll be finishing putting together a database in Access. Among several other things. Work is not dull, that’s for sure.

posted by lee on 03/27/08 at 11:59 PM
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Friday, March 14, 2008

found out the cell type

And it’s B cell. Which is the less virulent form of lymphoma. Which means the prognosis is better—the vet told Stanley that this type usually responds well to chemo. Ginger seems full of piss and vinegar today, and her lymph glands seem back to their normal size.

Just a quickie update!

posted by lee on 03/14/08 at 02:59 AM
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

she started chemotherapy

We went to see the vet oncologist yesterday—Ginger’s doctor is Amanda Elpiner. Ginger seems to like her, though not as much as she likes Dr. Re. Dr. Elpiner filled us in on what lymphoma is, treatment options, costs, things like that.

She said at this point, they stage the cancer, which is determining what organs are affected and whether or not she’s acting sick. Staging is taking bone marrow (while Ginger is under anesthesia), doing an ultrasound, and determining which type of lymphoma Ginger has: b-cell or t-cell. T-cell is the more virulent form. Complete staging costs $800, and other than determining which type of cancer cell Ginger has, does not determine treatment. The initial drug, Elspar, is what would be given for either b-cell or t-cell. We already knew we wanted to most aggressive treatment option.

While on one level I would like to know all of the staging details, thinking about Ginger, what I really want is for her not to be prodded and poked and stuck with needles and put under anesthesia any more than is necessary for treatment. Stanley and I decided to forgo the staging and spend the money on treatment.

Treatment is not cheap. It’s going to cost us at a minimum $6,000—could even be up to $10,000 depending on how long she needs treatment. It’s once a week for six treatments, every other week for six treatments, then every third week for the rest of the year. Or something like that. That’s for the treatment—food and supplements will add to the bill, though we’ve always opted for higher premium foods so the food bill won’t be that much higher. I guess we won’t be taking any luxury vacations or cruises any time soon. Treatment, if it’s b-cell and all goes well, can get her anywhere from one to three years of remission, 10% to 30% of her expected lifespan. We’ll know the cell type by Wednesday or Thursday.

So, Ginger has been on K-9 Immunity for three days, got her chemo drug yesterday, and was put on prednisone for a month (descending dosages, to taper her off), to get the swelling of the lymph nodes down. Her lymph nodes have already gone down quite a lot—I was shocked at how much and how fast. Pleased too.

Ginger, of course, turned into dead weight when she was supposed to go into the back room for her treatment. Stanley and I had to drag her back there while they did the cell test and gave her the first injection. She shied away from Dr. Elpiner when the doc tried to examine her—like she does with Dr. Re. But, after her treatment, the door opened and she came running over to us, in pretty good spirits. She then went into Dr. Post’s office to see who that guy was, and she liked him, wagging her tail like crazy. Then went back into Dr. Elpiner’s room to say goodbye to her, tail wagging. Trotting around the place like she’s an old pro already. I hope it’s not a battle to get her in next week—there will be times when I have to take her by myself and there’s no way I can lift her. So hopefully she’ll remember the nice people who petted her afterwards rather than the before stuff.

Today, she’s been sleeping a lot. She was really mean to Slink last night, so we’ll have to watch for prednisone-induced personality changes. She seems tired rather than sick, though her nose is warm and dry. And the prednisone makes her drink a lot, which makes her have to pee a lot and when she’s gotta go, she’s GOT TO go. Clients will, I hope, understand when I suddenly have to put them on hold to let her out.

Oh, and I discovered the best way to give her pills is to stick them in the middle of pieces of string cheese. I put the fish oil in a small can of wet dog food—those are too big for the cheese. And I have to keep remembering that she’s right under my chair—she’s taken to curling up as close to my ankles as she can get. (Here is a photo Stanley took of Ginger curled around my chair. Click to enlarge.)

Jeopardy is starting—I should go see if Stanley is awake—he had a new post installed for his new replacement crown and came home from the dentist with a bad headache, so I told him to just go lie down. Which he did—he rarely corks out during the day, only when he really doesn’t feel well.

posted by lee on 03/11/08 at 05:20 PM
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Saturday, March 08, 2008

another journey i didn’t ever want to make

Right now, I’m kind of numb. On Thursday, Dr. Re, Ginger’s vet, called. Ginger has lymphoma:

The lymph system is the body’s “other” circulatory system, circulating white blood cells and most importantly, lymphocytes. These are specialized cells involved in immune function found throughout the body. In normal healthy dogs, these cells are manufactured in the bone marrow, go through a life span of around 30 days, and then die off and are re-absorbed into the body or eliminated through the waste channels. In Lymphoma, the regulation of production is lost and these cells proliferate in large number, or they lose their programed life cycle and continue to live on, overwhelming the other blood cells. High white blood cell count and swollen lymph glands are the characteristic signs of this disease, followed by lethargy, loss of appetite and leading eventually to death unless treated.

When we found Ginger at the Westport Connecticut Humane Society in October 2001, they said she is a Golden Retriever, but had no papers. Whether she’s a purebred or not doesn’t really matter to us—we chose the dog, not the background. But we’ve discovered that goldies face some problems that most other breeds and mutts don’t, and one of them is a 1 in 8 chance of developing lymphoma. As I said to Stanley, that’s why, when we brought her to Dr. Re last week, she just knew what was wrong. We could see it in her face.

We saw Dr. Re Friday at noon, Ginger in tow. She briefly laid out our options, ranging from making her comfortable until she dies to treating it aggressively and seeing if we could get her into remission. Without treatment, she’ll die in a couple of months. With treatment, we can give her a year to two years of life—a good quality of life.

Ginger appears to be a good candidate for aggressive treatment since she’s not yet sick from the cancer. We caught it very, very early—she didn’t have the lumps, or if she did they weren’t noticeable, when Stanley bathed her on February 23 (before heading to Natick to watch the Oscars). The only way she wouldn’t be is if she has, I think, the T-cell form instead of the B-cell form, as the T-cell form is particularly virulent and does not respond to chemotherapy. Mostly, we don’t want Ginger to be in pain. There would be no point to prolonging her life if she is going to be miserable. But from everything we’ve read, from what the vet said, most dogs respond very well to chemotherapy and have an excellent quality of life. She’s a good dog and we love her, so of course we want to keep her alive as long as possible. She makes our lives fuller and I, for one, couldn’t have gotten through Stanley’s surgeries and other problems without her. She kept me sane. We owe her life for all she’s given us. Yes, it’s going to be expensive—thousands of dollars, from what we’ve been able to discover. We can’t really afford it, but what else can we do? So we’re going ahead with treating her—if we can give her at least one more summer on the beach in Oscoda, it will be worth it for all she’s given us. We have an appointment at 10 a.m. Monday with the oncology vet, at the Veterinary Oncology & Hematology Center here in Norwalk. It is headed by Dr. Gerald Post, whom Dr. Re praises highly. There Ginger’s cancer will be staged and they will outline treatment options and we’ll get started. I already know I will have to document this whole journey in order to get through it—writing it all out here helped me get through Stanley’s operations and his near-death brushes. Also, I read a lot about diet and immunotherapy (I’ve read a lot already—bless the Internets ... ). Ginger needs a high-protein, high-fat diet, low in carbs since carbs, apparently, feed the cancer. We got some IAMs puppy chow for her, as that is one of the brands recommended on http://www.dogcancer.net—it’s first ingredient is chicken vs. a grain or corn. We also purchased a month’s worth of K-9 Immunity (painfully expensive)—the one-month kit. It came this morning. Giving her the pills is fairly easy—I just poked them in the middle of a piece of string cheese and Ginger gobbled them down. I have to give her nine of these per day. The fish oil capsules were a problem—she ate the cheese and spit out the capsules. Stanley said to put them in her wet dog food—that worked just fine. The immune factor tablet is supposed to taste like liver—after hesitating, she finally chomped it down. I gave her half this morning and will do the other half this evening—but the instructions say they can all be done at once so that’s what I’ll do starting tomorrow. A new daily ritual. If it helps, it’s worth it. I will ask her vet about it on Monday—they also offer immunotherapy as one of the treatments so they’ll know more about it. I want to try everything that works—I’m shooting for a two-year remission at least. Why not? She’s only seven years old and other than the cancer, very healthy. I’m going to put a donation button up—if readers want to contribute to her treatment, I welcome the donations. In exchange I promise to faithfully document everything, including costs, so that others facing this will know what to expect, what works for us, what doesn’t, pitfalls and victories, everything. I don’t expect any donations, but they sure would help. We’ll find out more on Monday how much this is going to cost us—the estimate, anyway. So my ten-year, get-out-of-debt-including-the-mortgage-plan takes eleven years—Ginger is worth it.

posted by lee on 03/08/08 at 04:27 PM
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