We went to the vet Saturday morning preparing ourselves for bad news. Honestly, we were ok with bad news. If we were told he wasn’t going to walk again, we were ok with that. We had already decided that as long as he’s happy, then we are happy. He’s eatting, drinking and going potty outside and smiling when it’s sunny. We got him into the vet’s office just fine but poor Buddy just shook like a leaf. Actually he shook like one of those old, weird exercise machines from the 50’s that you see on TV, that shakes your hips for you while you stand there doing nothing. OMG, this poor dog. Vet looked him over and suggested we do x-rays to get a better idea of what we are looking at. His heart, despite his trembling and lungs looked very good. So off he went on his little gurney. No, he was not to happy about being carted off on that. Our sweet vet came back with the xrays and a huge smile on her face! She said, ” I have good news guys!” His hip’s look great. His back looks great. His left knee has a completely torn ACL! Well holy cow! We were not expecting that! So, given his age, yes we can do laser surgery but really he just needs rest and a good NSAID to work for him. We also asked about a brace and she said yes that would be helpful. So, we are going to try Rimadyl on him again. He had that about 5 years ago and it gave him diarrhea. But that was 5 years ago. She put him on a low dose and has us increasing his dose after a week so his body can get used to it. He will still take Tramodol 3 time’s a day as well. All good news right?! Well, while we were looking at his xrays our vet shouted “OH! WHAT’S THAT?!” It was a little clip of his lungs that appeared to be dark. She said,” You know guys, cancer in the lungs was always a possibility with him.” But, she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at because the focus was on his legs and back. Not his lung’s. It wasn’t a full x-ray and it may have been nothing. If he does have cancer in there, he’s not showing any sign’s of it. He’s 15, there’s nothing we can do about that. Chemo is not a choice for us. We just don’t think it’s fair to him to put him through something like that. The cost of that is also a reality that we just can’t do. So we all decided, including our vet, that we didn’t see that.
He’s been on his new med’s since Sunday and appear’s to be handling it well! He seem’s more comfortable. He can stand for a few second’s here and there. He wants to get up on his own and tries really hard but he’s just not ready yet. We ordered him a brace off of Amazon that arrived yesterday. Unfortunately it was to big and the fit wasn’t right. We ordered another one from a different company off of Amazon that should be here next week sometime. Finger’s crossed.
We have hope now. I will give an update on his progress soon! Thank you all for your love and support. It really mean’s an awful lot to us. We love and appreciate our tripaw family.
Biopsy results came back Friday night. It’s a soft tissue sarcoma stage 2 out of 3. That means that there is a 20% chance that the cancer could metastasize somewhere else. It’s a slow growing cancer. BUT our vet said he feels he got 99.9% of the cancer out of his chest. He also said,” I think you bought him a significant amount of time.” Are you kidding me?! This was waaaay more than what we hoped for! We are hoping it will never rear its ugly head again. Prayers answered. We are celebrating! 
