Tomorrow is Asa's next oncology checkup. I hate those days. Mind you, I believe the UGA vet faculty, residents, students, and staff walk on water. Heck, Asa was expected to live 2-6 months after surgery (even with chemo), yet here we are sneaking up on month 22! (Yes, you celebrate post-cancer survival like a baby's age when the prognosis is so dire) So I feel so blessed and lucky beyond imagination, but it's still unnerving to return to the scene of the crime each month.
For extra fun, Asa had some chemo side effects since the last update, and I haven't felt much like writing. What seemed to be a UTI or the beginnings of old age incontinence has turned out to be bladder inflammation brought on by the chemo. As we all know, chemo is poison, and as we also know, the body purges what it can't use. Chemo by-products (or whatever the technical term is) have to stop by the bladder on their way out, thus the frequent advice from our vets that he should get outside to pee-pee frequently. My post-game analysis is that I should have interrupted his champion sleeping habits more often to get him outside more.
Thanks to the bladder fun, he had to stop chemo. Thankfully he's already on a cocktail of pain meds (NSAID to complement the chemo, tramadol (aka doggie Tylenol in my house) and a nerve blocker for his old man arthritis), so Superdawg hasn't felt the misery of bladder problems.
Several months ago, when he had been on the metronomic chemo pills for a year, the amazing Dr. R.R. gave me the option to stop the chemo for a couple of reasons - 1) no long-term research on the benefits or side effects of his kind of chemo and 2) good chance the cancer might not come back since he made it this far. But we agreed it probably wouldn't hurt to keep him on it, and I'm ok that we did despite this episode. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
Now we wait for the bladder condition to improve before we even think about more chemo. Could be a week, could be 6 months or more. In the meantime, he needs to go outside every 2-3 hours. Oi vey! Thank the dear Lord for my helpful Superparents who come by my house to take him outside when I'm at work. I simply couldn't play this as a one-person sport, and if you look up "there for you" in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of my Mama and Daddy!
My big worry about being off chemo is... being off chemo. Is "the cancer that ALWAYS comes back" waiting to pounce now? Or has the sum of the treatments been enough to make him the 1 in 100+ who defies hemangiosarcoma and gracefully rides into the sunset of old age?
In reality, it's not my choice to make this time. His body has had enough chemo. We'll continue to celebrate each monthly milestone (heck, every single day!) as extra innings. I just find myself still surprised he's almost 14 and not the psycho puppy he used to be. Except for that sleeping championship he seems to be competing for, he doesn't seem to know he's not a puppy either.
