Relieved to be home and seeing that Corie is in fact O.K has taken a huge weight off my shoulders. And for the first time since picking her up I take a good hard look at the surgery site. I tried not to be horrified but I couldn’t help it. A flood of emotions ran through me in that moment! What had I done? Was this the right choice? I was staring at the zipper of all zippers that was currently holding the pieces of my dog together and I was responsible for what at the time seemed like a horrible and cruel disfigurement! I’ll admit that at times I can be overly emotional and prone to hyperbole, and looking back I’m sure I wasn’t handling things well.
Not really sure what to do next I decided to drag all the pillows from my bedroom down to where Corie was and make myself a little nest so settle in beside her. With my phone in hand I wiled away my time sifting through emails, checking Facebook, reading whatever I could find about various dog cancers and how they are treated, and seeking out the comfort of people who had been through this before.
The first night was very hard, I had no warning from my vet as to what I should expect. All through the night she cried, she hardly slept. I was so distraught by the morning having gotten no sleep myself and worried for her I called my vet. He told me that she was experiencing the effects of the drugs they gave her and that all of it was normal. But the second night was the same.
Lon top of that her confidence in walking was eroding and she was becoming increasingly unwilling to get out of her bed. So accidents started happening in the house and while she was sleeping. I was going on three days of almost no sleep and the stress was starting to boil over. So I made my first post on the tripawds forum and quickly got the support I needed. Tears running down my cheeks, not for the time since this ordeal started I wrote about my fears and struggled. I was met with open arms and understanding. It was like a life line.
By day three the drugs were finally starting to wear off, puppy pads and rugs were everywhere around the house and although I still didn’t feel like I had a grip on things we were marching on. By the end of the first week, although I could see her surgery sight was healing up on schedule things weren’t right. Her appetite was virtually nonexistent and she was listless. I was hopeful that the healing process was just taking longer for her because of her age, but that was not the case.
So more bloodwork needed to be done, when that showed nothing, then it was time for an ultrasound, then it was more bloodwork. And when the dust finally settled the diagnosis was Addisons disease, because we needed one more thing to deal with. All the while she has a horrible sinus infection that won’t go away and the doctor is telling me that it’s possible it could be caused by the cancer having spread into her sinus cavity!
There was relief in finally having an answer to the problem, but in the mean time she only weighed 32 pounds and I was afraid everyday that she would die of starvation, no matter what I did, made or cooked she would not eat! Thank god forsteroids (sometimes)! The first time she ate I cried! And I thought, ok, now we have a fighting chance!
