Husky Update: Too Many Trips to the Vet
Time to dust this thing off for a life update.
Tomorrow Wizard will lose one of his kidneys, and this is a good thing.
Two weeks ago, wizard came home from doggy daycare with a report that handlers had noticed possible blood in his urine. He seemed otherwise healthy, so we kept an eye on things, and sure enough, we also saw what looked like blood. We got him in to the vet, and the normal blood work and urinalysis came back with hints of something amiss, but nothing conclusive. We put him on antibiotics in case it was a urinary tract infection, and we had X-rays to look for bladder stones, but nothing showed up there. We went into wait and see mode.
Over the next week, the amount of blood in his urine varied, sometimes quite a bit, but we were still monitoring the situation while giving the antibiotics time to work and while we waited on the urine culture (which would have told us what kind of infection it might be and whether we were dealing with a resistant strain that would be tougher to counter). Late last week we noticed his behavior change a little, but nothing the vet thought he needed to come in for, until on Friday we took him and Gypsy for a walk and he just sat down and did not want to move. We quickly aborted the walk and returned home for his medical paperwork, and then rushed him off to the ICU. By the time we got there, he was so weak that he could not walk on his own and had to be carried in. We thought we were about to lose him at that point. Fortunately we did not!
The good news that day was that the weakness was due to anemia and some dehydration: he’d lost so much blood in his urine that he simply didn’t have enough RBCs to keep oxygen flowing. We had been monitoring his gums for signs of anemia, but apparently we had misread what their color indicated. And, although he was still drinking water, it had not been enough to counter what he was losing in urine. After IV fluids and rest, he was back on his feet. He recovered pretty quickly over the weekend, to the point that his behavior returned to near normal. We were quite happy at his turn-around, but we knew that it was time for more involved diagnoses. We scheduled him for an ultrasound on Monday.
The news on Monday was tough to take: Wizard had extensive cancer in one of his kidneys. It wasn’t just an infection. The ultrasound told us that he still had one good kidney (which had apparently been doing work for the both of them for some time), but not whether the cancer may have spread. He became Schrödinger’s Dog: he had a condition that was simultaneously treatable or not treatable at the same time, until we looked further into the black box. We had one ray of hope: if the cancer was contained to the one kidney and his other one seemed still functional, we could remove it and hope for months, if not years, of additional quality of life. However, if the cancer had spread, removal was unlikely to be successful; radiotherapy and chemotherapy were also not likely to be successful for this type of cancer. If that were the case, we faced the prospect of providing palliative care while nature took its course.
Today, Wizard went in for chest X-rays and we got the good news we had been wishing we would hear: the vet could find no evidence of cancer in the chest region (where presumably the cancer would have appeared if it had spread) and his good kidney’s function remained high enough that it should be able to handle things with the bad one gone (and perhaps even better now). With luck, he will be largely back to normal afterwards, with just some need for dietary adjustment and more frequent blood tests. (We still await the radiologist’s review of the X-rays, but if the vet could not see anything out of the normal, anything the radiologist turns up would have to be quite small and early in development, which buys us time.)
Wizard is scheduled for surgery tomorrow. Again, we lucked out because someone had canceled, otherwise we’d be waiting and worrying until next week. (He’s had more bleeding recently, so we are worried about any longer wait to remove the bad kidney.) There is apparently a canine blood shortage, but the vet has a donor on standby in case a transfusion is needed. We can now just wait and hope that he pulls through the surgery, and then moves on to recovery without complications.
This has been quite an emotional rollercoaster the last week or two. It started out with the vague dread that things could be worse than we’d hoped, on to confirmation of the scary word “cancer,” and finally to a ray of hope that he may pull through this round. Wizard is 8 ½ years old. He’s been with us on many adventures, from Minnesota to Massachusetts, hiking, sniffing, swimming and generally enjoying life. We were not ready to lose him, and we’re grateful that we have a good chance to keep him around for more months, and hopefully years. He’s such a good boy, and seems to be loved by all (except for that one dog at daycare that he hates!) and we will do whatever we can to keep him happy and healthy, even if it’s going to put a squeeze on our finances. He trusts us unconditionally, and we will do our best to live up to his expectations.
Please wish him, and us, luck tomorrow!