My parents have two dogs, Jacob and Mariah. Mariah is a malamute and Jacob is a malamute/German Shepard mix. We had had a scare earlier this year when Mariah was deathly ill with pancreatitis, but she recovered and is doing better than she has in a long time. The picture above is an older photo of Jacob.
Jacob hasn’t been doing so hot. He’s been flinching away from playing with our dog, Tundra, and yelping that he’s hurt when there isn’t anything wrong that we could see. And on Monday, he was lethargic and unwell. Mom brought him into the vet Tuesday, and they discovered he had nodules on his spleen, one of which had burst and was filling his abdomen with blood.
Cue emergency surgery in Madison (the largest nearby city). Mom and Dad rushed him there Tuesday night because the local vet can’t do blood transfusions. They went in, cut out the nodes, took a biopsy of his liver and spleen, and he came home doing much better.
He’s home, he’s energetic, he obviously feels much better.
The results of the biopsy came back.
He has an aggressive form of cancer. Mom and Dad had already discussed it, and they won’t give him chemo or anything that would make him suffer. The odds aren’t good, and you can’t explain to a dog why you’re doing things that make him hurt. So they’re looking into his options. One thing Mom has discussed is trying the keto diet for him as there has been some good results with dogs, keto, and cancer.
But this sucks. And Tundra is very confused that he can’t play with Jacob when they go over because of his incision.
Bad news comes in threes, I guess, because that’s not the only thing going on.
Have you had a pet with cancer? What were your options, and how did you deal with it?
Sadness 😪hopefully the keto diet helps. As a kid our golden retriever had cancer, bit the treatment was easier, we got her fixed. There was talk of our options and that seemed like the easiest lest painful thing for her. I guess you make the decision the same way you would for a small child or elderly with Alzheimer’s. You want them to be OK without pain in the easiest way possible and you hope that one day they might understand.