Dogged Blog

A Caption is Worth a Thousand Words

No comment. The caption says it all. Via Stranger Fruit:

Nothing to Lose

I took Raven into the vet on Tuesday. It turned out her couple of  bad days were the result of a  minor back injury, and she's back to running and playing as if nothing had ever happened. It probably  had nothing to do with the chemo, or at least, not much.

But while she was there they did an x-ray, and the local vet saw something suspicious in her lungs. So we went off to our vet and my friend, Helen Hamilton, who did a complete chest series and confirmed all our worst fears: The chemo has totally failed to control the spread of the cancer and Raven's lungs are full of metastases.

Ten weeks ago her lungs were clear, now she's loaded with mets. For those who don't live in Osteo Hell like we do now, you might not know that this is the worst possible news.  Given the rapid spread, and the absolute lack of accepted treatments for lung mets in osteosarcoma, this is the end. Four to 8 weeks, said Helen. But... she also said she was going to find out if there was anything anywhere we could try, some experimental therapy, some trial, something, anything. She seemed to want it as badly as I did. Almost.

I wasn't hopeful, really, but she took me by surprise when she scared up some information today about a nebulization therapy with interleukin-2, a form of immune stimulant that is nebulized into the lungs. Amazingly, you do this therapy at home.

It's experimental and there's very little data. It seems pretty safe. We have nothing at all to lose.

Medline abstract here. I have a PDF file with the full study plus dosage information; post here or email me if you want me to send it to you.

And no, of course I'm not as calm as I seem. I'm terrified. I cried for two days and couldn't even tell my friends. But I have a happy dog here and I am going to see if I can keep her that way a little longer. Denial, hope, grasping at straws, I have no idea what it is. But it's what I've got.

Small Government, No Boat

"To be poor in America was to be invisible, but not after this week, not after those images of the bedraggled masses at the Superdome, convention center and airport. No one can claim that the post-Reagan orthodoxy of low taxes and small government, which does wonders for the extremely rich, also inevitably does wonders for the extremely poor. What was that about a rising tide lifting all boats? What if you don't have a boat?"

- Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, via Sojourners.

Mom vs. The Governator

My mom called tonight and expressed her amazement at Arnold Schwarzenegger's stated intention of vetoing California's marriage  equality act, passed by both the state senate and state assembly. His excuse ... er, I mean, REASON ... was that he doesn't believe in overturning the will of the people, who had voted  in the 2000 election to pass  Prop. 22, which declared that marriage was between a man and a woman.  But as my mom pointed out, that dog won't hunt.

"Last I noticed," she said, "He doesn't call Al Gore 'Mr. President.' And he didn't seem to have any problem overturning the election two years later, either, where Gray Davis was elected governor of California."

You go, mom!

Horse People are Wonderful

"Where ever man has left his footprint in his long ascent from barbarism to civilization, we will find the hoofprint of a horse beside it."
-John Trotwood Moore

The pet websites I work for have been busy publishing  requests for assistance, donations, and foster homes for the animals of people affected by Hurricane Katrina. All the volunteers on our sites and our sites' users have responded with great compassion, but I've been especially impressed and moved by the kindness and generosity of the horse community.

I passed along a request for help I received from the United States Equine Federation to the mailing list for Hoofbeats, the HorseHobbyist.com email newsletter, and got an overwhelming response. People are offering not just space for displaced horses and farm animals, but room in homes and trailers for their human families, too. Several offered to take their own trailers and drive across multiple states to go pick up horses.

I know it's not politically very smart to spend too much time talking about helping animals when people are in trouble, but there is something about empathy  that, once it gets going, really doesn't know how to stop. You might start out caring only about cats and dogs and ponies, but the boundaries of kindness don't end at the species line.

Animal make me a better person. And it's clear that horses, with their great hearts and capacity for enormous forgiveness, make their owners better people too.

The Incredible Shrinking Government

I was watching Anderson Cooper crying on CNN and thought... well, this is it, this is small government. How does everyone like it?

I'm perfectly happy to blame Bush and his keepers, er, I mean his ADMINSTRATION, for this whole mess, but it's not only their fault. It's the fault of every person who let the infrastructure  of this country rot and decay in the name of lower taxes and small government during the last two decades.

How's that working out for ya, guys? Or are your mansions and SUVs and big screen TVs dry and fully powered and so you don't actually care?

In the Shadows

I stood in the little herb shop today, wanting to buy some eyebright to make a soothing eye wash for Raven. She had chemo on Wednesday and now has irritated eyes, aches and pains, and seems very sad.

I'm sad too - between harrowing images of human and, yes, animal suffering on CNN and flooding into my email box, and watching Raven descend into her chemotherapeutic depression, knowing that however good my intentions, I'm responsible for subjecting her to it - I'm so sad and lost right now I hardly know how to describe it.

So when they told me they had no eyebright, I just wandered around the shop, looking at what they did have on their well-stocked shelves. Turmeric, I thought - I should buy that, I heard it's good for cancer.  I idly picked up jars of unfamiliar Ayurvedic herbs and familiar Western herbs, looking for something, anything, that would make my dog well.

And then I started to cry. Because there really is nothing in that store, or any other store, that I can buy to beat this.

I got home and she was still where she'd been five hours before. I couldn't lure her off the sofa, but she ate food from my hand. At dinnertime I made her get up, but she only staggered a few steps before sinking onto a dog bed, exhausted.

I know that chemo reactions can be violent and horrible, but after four  treatments so far, this is the first one she's had, and by any standard it's mild. Except mine, because the sadness in her eyes is killing me.

The first time she had chemo was the day she had her stitches out from the amputation. She slept through it, her head in my lap. But every subsequent time she's been less accepting, more distressed. I thought we might be faced with vomiting and diarrhea and some kind of major upheaval of her body that I could point to and say, enough. But instead it's just this sadness, this shadow in her eyes, this weakness and loss of joy.

Today I spent hours adding Hurricane Katrina pet-related stories to the news feed on one of the sites run by the company I work for, Pet Press.net. Some of the stories made me cry like a baby, dogs and cats being crudely euthanized by people trying to spare them drowning and slow starvation. A little dog scratching at the door of the bus taking his owner away. A report from a veterinarian on the scene not able to give more than the most basic care to the animals in need of so much more.

It's not that I don't like people. It's not even that I like dogs more than people. It's that I view the world through a certain kind of filter, the one that cares what happens to the world because it's the world my dogs live in. And I feel so helpless, helpless against all the things that threaten human and animal life. All the things that rip beloved animals from the arms and care of people who cherish them. All the things that implacably smash that powerful force we clinically call the "human-animal bond."

Things like hurricanes. And cancer.

Tonight Raven seems a little better. She ate her dinner, she drank some water, she batted playfully at my head when I knelt down to hug her. I thought I saw some sparkle in her eyes. I gave money again to the Red Cross and to a fund for veterinarians volunteering in the disaster zone. I flushed her eyes with sterile saline and made eggs poached in beef broth for her dinner. I knelt next to her with a water bowl, and she had a drink.

And I cried.