Amber is gone

On Thursday I took her with me to visit my dad who lives about 3 hours outside of Boise. She hadn't been on any hikes in about a week and a half and was seeming pretty antsy to do something. I had hope! My dad is one of her very favorite people in the whole world. When we got to his place Thursday night she was all over him, licking his face, nibbling his nose (she used to occasionally draw blood!), and leaping up at him, so excited to see him again.
On Friday morning we took everyone on a short hike. It was beautiful there, hills of yellow flowers, perfect hiking temperature. She ran and ran.

I didn't get any good clear action shots of her.

I had her pose in this neat old brick building along the trail.

She ate really well that night and slept so soundly, right by my side, under the covers on Dad's futon.









I woke up this morning to her looking at me, wagging her tail. I reached up to scratch her ears and rub her cheeks. She rolled over and started making her bear cub noises, rooting in the covers on top of me.
We took the dogs on another little hike, so pretty in the shade with butterflies, hummingbirds and wildflowers everywhere. Amber didn't run like she usually does but did enjoy it. I noticed that she was stopping very often to pee, much more than was her "normal".
While Dad and I stopped to watch the creek for a while, she and Rye dug a nice hole together, taking turns, throwing dirt down the back of my shirt. 
She stopped to point something along the trail.

 Back at Dad's house she couldn't stop trying to pee. We drove the 3 1/2 hours home. I picked up my husband and we headed to the emergency clinic. She tried to pee on their lawn, nothing, tried to pee in their lobby, nothing, tried to pee in the exam room, nothing. It was torture.
The vet said she had very enlarged lymph nodes, the "iliac" lymph nodes as well as the "sublumbar" lymph nodes. We talked about the stent. She did not feel that it would give her very much time and that the time would not be quality time. So we made the decision to say goodbye to my baby dog.
Dear Amber,
I will never ever forget you. You are in my heart, you are my heart, forever. If there is such a thing as a dog soul mate, you are it for sure. I can still feel your eyes on me, wanting something. I can still see you at my feet since someone just let off a firecracker. I can still feel your softer than soft ears between my fingers. I can see your eyes light up when I mention "bedtime" or "daddy" and how you would rush to the doorway of the bedroom but then turn around and watch to make sure I was coming too.
I hope that where ever you are, you are not alone. You would be in the laps of the angels if they would let you.
You were my most beautiful athlete. One of my favorite things in the world was to watch you run through the fields. A walk just won't be the same without you. Life just won't be the same either.
I love you my baby dog.

 Amber at around 8 weeks.

Amber at 8 years, 9 months old. Her very last photo.

Two down

and I'm not sure if we'll go back for more chemotherapy or not. Amber had a pretty poor reaction to the carboplatin last Thursday and is only now starting to eat fairly normally again. She is now on sulfasalazine for diarrhea and just today had to go in for some sub Q fluids and an injection of cerenia for nausea. Our oncologist is out of town until tomorrow so I guess I'll see what she thinks. Though even if she thinks we should keep going with treatments it will take a lot of convincing on her part to make me go ahead with it. I sure don't like it when the baby dog doesn't eat! I tried everything I could think of and finally last night she ate some baked ground pork but nothing else and only out of my hand, not out of a bowl. Today after the fluids and anti nausea shot she does seem a bit better. They want her on a bland food diet so she had boiled hamburger and white rice tonight which she ate well.
I have not been taking her on any walks and I can tell how easy it would be if I didn't have dogs to skip exercise all the time! Rye, being 11 years old, doesn't demand exercise and Amber surely didn't feel up to it. I'm hoping by this weekend she'll be back to normal and want a little hike. It just doesn't feel right without some kind of dog fun in each day!
These pictures are from last week Wednesday night, the night before the chemo. One of our favorite spots when it gets hot.
I LOVE when she jumps this wooden fence. It just looks so effortless.

Don't worry, she can NOT catch them, she never ever has and they know it, they swim very slowly, just far enough ahead of her. When there are ducklings she is not allowed in the water.

Rye sees a duck across the river but he is not a swimmer.

Rye found a lovely dead fish to roll on. I normally would have tried to make him stop instead of taking pictures but wasn't in the mood that night. Smelly car ride home and a bath.

BFFs

One down

Five chemotherapy treatments left to go, if all goes well. Amber had the first treatment yesterday morning and did seem a little quiet most of the day. When we got home I gave her a bully stick to chew and she ate half of it and then buried the rest in the couch for later. She ate her dinner and brought me her stuffed soccer ball to play a few times but other than that was in her kennel curled up all day. They gave her a drug called Mitoxantrone, a quick injection. The next one will be a different drug given IV for 20 minutes.
I brought them this picture of her from her last show. My little athlete. Photo by Randy Gaines
By the way, it's just KILLING me that she is so perfect in every other way still, just that one body part....

They told me I didn't have to do anything differently, just to let her tell me when she was ready for normal activity. This morning she was fairly normal again. Every morning I listen for the sound of her rolling on the couch, she makes these noises that sound like a bear scratching its back on a tree. This morning was no exception, I was happy to hear her. She seemed to want to do something so we went for a short hike, she did just fine!

We took them for another run tonight. Eagle Island again, our favorite place.
The sun was just setting and it was perfect light for photos. Lots of bugs though!
See all the insects?

 I have lots of very similar shots but can't decide which ones I like best so I'm posting them all.

Upon coming home I am almost convinced that the chemo has made her feel BETTER. For the past few months she has not seemed very excited about her food, she still ate it but just didn't act like she used to. She used to sit in the kitchen and watch me make it, drooling, and lately she has been waiting on her bed til she hears me put Rye's dish down to get up and eat. Tonight she watched me make her dinner.

You should see her drug basket. Mixed in with her food she gets one Omeprazole (prilosec) twice a day, to help protect her stomach from the effects of the Deramaxx which she gets once a day. Now she has Metochlopramide, twice a day to help prevent upset stomach from the chemo. I give her a total of 3 fish oil capsules a day, good for lots of stuff, she gets cranberry juice capsules twice daily to help keep her urine acidic, a vitamin E once a day, and I've been making a mix based on something called the "Budwig diet". It sounds silly but I don't think it can hurt her. It was recommended on a dog cancer forum. It is about 3 tablespoons flax seed oil and 6 tablespoons cottage cheese, blended using my handy dandy hand mixer, until it is very smooth and creamy. Something about the blending of the two is what's important.

Goodnight and thanks for reading!

We are still here!

Hello, World! Though we have been pretty depressed around here, we have been trying to take the dogs on as many of our favorite walks as possible.
Amber seems to be trying to pee a little more often, with less and less actually coming out, which is how it goes. I watch her every day to see that she can still pee. I'm sorry for the tmi. At home she can lie (I almost wrote "lay", Morris) around on the couch or in the grass for long periods of time without having to pee but on a hike I think the running motion makes her feel like she has to go more often. It is painful for me to watch but doesn't seem to bother her at all.
After taking her to a specialist last week and after way too much deliberation and backing and forthing on the subject we have decided to take her for chemotherapy treatments starting next week. I have always said that I would not give a pet chemo. I didn't really have a reason, I guess I thought it was prolonging their life just for the sake of their owner, not for the good of the dog. It sounds like dogs handle it much better than humans, so we are really hoping it doesn't have any ill side affects  for her. If it does I would not continue with the treatments. It may shrink the tumor and it may slow it down, so we will hope for that. It feels good to have decided.
I have no good excuse for why it has taken this long to get a diagnosis and start her treatment. I have been feeling VERY guilty. When the biopsy forceps first broke, during the first biopsy, I should have taken her right away to another clinic to get it done. I talked with my vet about doing that and he said we should try one more test, that bladder tumor antigen test, and if it came back positive then he would recommend getting the biopsy done as soon as possible, if it came back negative then he said I could relax for a little and get the biopsy done at a later date. The test was new to my vet, he hadn't used it before but felt confident in the results. Then it came back negative! I have to admit I didn't ACTUALLY think it would turn out to be cancer, not MY dog! So when we got the negative antigen test I DID relax.
I feel like crawling in a hole and never coming out again when I think of the last few months. I can't believe she got that MACH title only two months ago. I wish the agility gods would take back their stupid title and give me back my healthy dog. It's very hard to feel proud of it.
I don't mean to be such a bummer but I felt the need to write this down.
Today I took Amber to a Rally trial that I had entered a while back. I haven't worked that hard on intermittent rewards with her and it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought doing a whole course with no treats! You'd think all that agility would transfer over to Rally in her mind but it didn't seem to. With treats she can do everything pretty well! Even right before going in to the ring this morning she was very attentive since I had cheese and salmon treats. In the ring she was a little slow and didn't seem to love it all that much. Still, she came away with a score of 94 and a 1st place. The judge said she lost points for lagging behind and a few slow responses. It was our first ever attempt at Rally-O. 

 They had two trials, back to back in one day and we were entered for the second one but after doing the first one I decided it was such a nice day and that Amber would much rather be running in fields of green instead. So we went home, got Rye and took them to a magical doggy paradise called Eagle Island State Park. Here is a little video of them from today doing what they do out there.

and just for fun, helicopter tail!

Thanks for listening.

Bad news

We were able to do Amber's scope and biopsy last week Monday and got the results on Friday. She DOES have transitional cell carcinoma. So the bladder tumor antigen test was not correct. It does say there is a 90% rate of accuracy so I guess we fell in that 10%.

I was so not expecting that. I mean I thought about it, I had read about it a little, knew that it was the most common cancer of the urinary tract but that it was fairly uncommon in general. I somehow didn't actually think that MY dog could have it!

So now what? She is still acting normal except for having to pee a lot. It is not in an area that is easily accessed for removal (it's in her urethra), and these tumors don't respond much to chemotherapy. So she is on Deramaxx, used as an anti-inflammatory. The most common drug used to treat TCC is Piroxicam which is also an NSAID (non steroidal anti-inflammatory) but that is an older drug with more gastrointestinal side effects than Deramaxx. I will have to watch her carefully to make sure she can still pee and that it's not blocked off from tumor growth. If that happens I have a very short amount of time to get her to a vet to put in a catheter to empty the bladder and then we can put in a urinary stent to open up the passageway again. That will only last approximately six months according to my vet, and then it's the end I guess.

Information online says it is linked to chemical exposure like flea dips, bug sprays, lawn fertilizers, things like that. In humans it is linked to second hand smoke. I have always been one of those people that is very cautious with chemicals, I don't fertilize my lawn (but that's because I'm too cheap to buy food for my lawn when I could be buying food for us or the dogs and I don't care about the dandelions), I don't use pesticides, I buy environmentally friendly dish soap. I DON'T smoke. I HAVE brought the dogs to various parks near our house at least three times a week when we can't get to the foothills and I'm sure they don't use fertilizer that is safe for kids and pets (why????). I keep thinking of that woman who saw Amber swimming in the canal one summer day and said "you let your dog swim in that nasty water?". At the time I thought she was just being overly cautious, now I wish I could go back and be more careful with where I took them to play.

I know it's possible that it's genetic and wasn't caused by environmental toxins but I can't help but want to know where it started. One little carcinogenic piece of something she licked off her feet that lodged itself in the lining of her urethra and stayed there.

Another thing I read was that feeding yellow/green veggies at least 3 times a week, steamed and pureed, had some influence on reducing a dog's likely hood of getting this cancer (a study done on Scottish Terriers who are the breed most likely to get this). So eat your veggies, people! I've been making myself a breakfast smoothie and the dogs get a little on their food every morning. I make it without the banana first and then add the banana after they get their share. It is one banana, a handful of spinach or baby greens (organic), a few leaves of either oregano or parsley from my garden and lately I've been adding a few slices of zucchini and some ground flaxseed then add water. REALLY it tastes pretty good. Maybe I've just gotten used to it.

Anyway...Amber says she hates the vet. I took this picture for our website at work.