Not Good

We received some bad news today at Presley's doctor visit. The cancer appears to have spread to her other limbs and there are nodules in her chest.

The doctor showed us the x-rays and there are dark spots in the bone on her front right leg near her shoulder and on her rear left leg near her knee. The doctor also believes that the hard lumps near her left hip and thigh are also cancerous tumors. They are too hard to be just fatty tumors.

The x-rays also showed cloudiness and spots in her lungs compared to her chest x-rays taken in November.

The doctors and research all said that if we did not treat Presley with chemo after surgery that her life expectancy would be another 6 months on average. It's been almost 5 months since her surgery and the doctor thinks she may have another 3 to 4 weeks, based on what she's seen in other dogs.

Since Presley did so poorly on Deramaxx and Rhimadyl to treat pain, the doctor prescribed Tramadol with Pepcid AC. She also prescribed Medcam, as needed.

She also recommended that we consider Pamidronate Disodium I/V drip (a biophosphonate) because it could slow the growth of the tumors. The drip takes two hours per session to administer and they recommend doing this once a month. I'm leaning against this because everything we've tried with Presley has made her sick and I'm not sure she could take getting sick again.

They also took blood, which we'll have the results for that tomorrow. They want to check her kidney values in case we decide to go through with the drip.

The doctor mentioned that we could try acupuncture to treat the pain, but it didn't help before when we thought we were treating her for arthritis, so I can't imagine it would do any good now.

The crazy part about this is that Presley still eats really well and she still wants to play. Even today she played with a new ball we bought over the weekend.

No matter what, I just want to make sure she is comfortable. As long as she is eating, eliminating properly and enjoying life, then we'll keep treating the pain until something changes.