My Sweet Puppy

Porter has cancer. We found a small, hard lump on his right hind leg, like a ball bearing under the skin, roughly between the knee and hip joints. His vet told us not to worry, and removed it several weeks later during a routine dental cleaning. Then the path report they casually asked me if I wanted "just to be on the safe side" told us it was cancer - a Grade II Mast Cell Tumor with a low mitotic rate, to be exact. They said they'd have to call someone to figure out what to do next. I held it together until I got out of there (they told me my dog had cancer, good luck with that, and then charged me $27 for the office visit), and then my heart broke all over the place. It's such a scary thing, and he's such a beautiful, healthy dog. And not just a dog, or any old dog. He is MY dog, my family, and one of the unconditionally best things in my entire life, ever.

And then I got mad, and then we got a plan. We sought out some second opinions today from our former vet in the fancy practice I thought we no longer needed for the routine future yearly vaccinations I was sure was all the health care in Porter's future. Needless to say, our former vet is once again our current vet. The practice is advanced and modern; they have oncology expertise; they see this tumor every week. My vet's own lab Lilly battled this tumor last year. His former professor is one of the country's foremost canine oncology experts, and they talk all the time.

We have another surgery scheduled on Friday, during which the surgeon will attempt to enlarge the margins around the tumor site and excise all possible cancerous tissue. (His margins were clean laterally after the initial surgery; they're just going to try to go deeper and remove a little of the leg muscle to get clean margins deep. They assure me he'll rebound just fine with no loss of function to the leg.) Then a specialist with some fancy-pants equipment will ultrasound and x-ray his chest and abdomen to rule out any metastasis while he is under anesthesia and being a very still dog. We will be praying for clean margins and clear scans. If all goes well, we'll follow up in six months. Remission rates for this kind of aggressive approach are extremely good.

Porter is totally going to kick cancer's ass.