Scully, the World’s Best Dog, part 2.

In one of the previous installments of this blog, we told you about Scully, one of the animals we have treated for cancer.  Her type of cancer, lymphoma, is one of the few that are treated in the private practice setting on a regular basis.  You may remember from the earlier blog, that typical life expectancy after lymphoma treatment was 6 to 12 months and Scully had just passed the 16 month mark.  It may not sound long, but sixteen months means a lot of walks and doggie treats.

Scully had come in a couple of times during early November.  Things started to look progressively worse as the weeks passed, and her lymph nodes were getting larger.  We re-started chemotherapy in hopes that we could buy her even more time, despite the fact that she was well beyond average survival times already.

The day before Thanksgiving, Scully’s Mom brought her in and let me check her over once more.  The news wasn’t good: her disease simply wasn’t responding to the drugs anymore.

As I ran my hands over her, feeling the changes that the cancer was making, the right decision became clear.  I turned to Scully’s owner and recommended that they discontinue treatment. They did.

Things went along relatively normally until a couple of days before Christmas.  Scully had started to have some bad days.  She had an episode of weakness on Christmas Eve in the afternoon and evening, and I wound up talking to and checking in on them a couple of times that night.

I called back Christmas morning and found out that she had passed away the night before.  She had followed her owners outside to the mailbox that evening as she always did- it was sort of a ritual- and on her way back into the house she simply collapsed.  She passed away in her owner’s arms.

It was the best way I could have imagined it happening, really- She was at home doing the simple things that made her happy, and she was with the people she loved.  Her owners had been wrestling with the decision to euthanize ever since her turn for the worse. The stress of that decision hanging over their heads was a real burden for them, and understandably so.  As it happened, they didn’t have to make that call.

Whenever we get into the more intensive medical treatments in animals with a questionable prognosis, we always have to ask ourselves a series of questions.  What are the most likely outcomes if we proceed?  What are the risks?  Is the price something that the owner has the ability and desire to take on?

These types of decisions can become complex quickly; emotions have a heavy influence in how we approach things.  In Scully’s case, it turns out that the decision to treat her did have a good payoff.  She had well over a year of extra life, with the majority of it spent feeling good and being with the family she had always been with.  I feel good about that.

My wife is doing a guest blog about being married to a veterinarian, which should be interesting.  She’ll publish it in a week or two.

 

A teaser for my next blog:

Remember show and tell at your elementary school?  Me too.
Did you ever take a live possum?  I did.
It turned out to be more exciting than I had planned…-RAB