Diagnosis (for the dog, not me, haha)

Hopefully this will be the last update I have to do about my dog for awhile aside from announcing he's totally back to normal, which may or may not happen so this could be it for a while.

I took him to get his stitches out last night and hopefully get some news about the biopsy results. From the minute the vet mentioned cancer I just truly did not believe that he had cancer. And I was Right!! :) There was no evidence of cancer in the lab work. Unforunately the lab LOST his lymph node tissue sample so we only get 2/3rds of the results. The Vet is pisssssssseeeddd off! She credited the $$ of that biospy to my account (not even 5% of the total surgery bills, but whatever) but she knows she sent 3 samples to to the lab and they are claming the lymph tissue sample was missing. she thinks they dumped it out of the vial (it was a small sample) but she can't prove it.

Anyway, the liver came back with mild chronic hepatitis, which basically just means a minor infection and not really the cause of the problems. The Intestine biospy came back with enteritis. there were quite a few $0.25 medical terms in there too that our mdeical committee - my mom and  MIL are both nurses - dumbed down for us to mean a high number of white blood cells were present and enteritis just means an inflammation. Duh! haha

There are a few possible causes, one of which is bacterial overgrowth, which is not the cause in this case since the problem did not respond to the anitbiotics he's been on for almost a month now. It could be dietary incompatibility so he's now on a grain free diet (no more pizza crusts or pita chips for him!) and it just be an autoimmune fluke so he's on prednisone for the long term. This will hopefully supress the immune system and knock down the inflammation. It could cause gastric ulcers so he's on an antacid too. But the side effect we're hoping for is an increase in appetite! That would be awesome! :) he's down to 24 lbs, but I truly hope that's as low as he gets. He needs about 500 calories per day and to be honest we were lucky if we were getting 300-400 in him up till this point. we're going to double the amount of baby food we syringe feed him during the day since he can't have bread products which is what was usually making up some of the calories until hopefully he finds his appetite and starts eating more on his own. I have to get him Grain-Free dog food today. 8 jars of baby food that I bought yesterday are being donated to my friend's sister's baby since they have rice in them and that is $4 down the tubes.

And lastly the vet was so pleased with his demeanor and how well his incision healed! She left the stitches in for 1 days b/c she was worried the healing would be compromised by the low blood protein but he healed beautifully! and he was active and downright energetic last night in the office, the vet tech said "Druppy, you look so good! you're so skinny but you look so good!" That made me feel good :) And he didn't shake or cry/whine or spaz out the whole time we were there, he wanted to bolt out of there the first chance he got, but that's totally normal, he seemed so much "less sick" last night.

So all in all, things are as good as can be expected and we are hopefully on the path to getting our dog back on track and even if he has to be on prednisone to control this for a long time, at least we're doing something to get his quality of life back to normal!

Thank you all for the support, concern, thoughts and prayers! It has definitely gotten us through these past few weeks!

In TTC news, with all this stress I have not had my period since January 3rd or 4th. I'm not 100% certain when I O'ed since I'm not charting anymore, but I thought it was about 2 weeks ago. Last night I thought for sure my period was going to start today (and of course it still might) I tested monday morning and it was negative... I wasn't surprised. I'll probably wait until the weekend and if AF still hasn't arrived then I'll test again. The longer she holds out though, the less luckily we have any chance since I was pretty sure I o'ed right around his surgery (2 weeks ago) our romps in the sack were few and far between, there's stil la chance of course, but that chance is just not so great. and to be honest TTC really took a back seat to the dog's health concerns so now that we have that sort of under control, perhaps things will go better this next time around!