it absolutely pours.
The holidays were hectic, January wasn't much better but we figured that things would begin to quiet down a bit in February.
We were sadly mistaken. On Saturday, January 30th we took Buddy in to see his Dr. for an old dog check-up to make sure all was ok, with the plan of having his teeth cleaned. When his Dr Laborde checked his mouth, she found a tumor growing that we had not noticed, and she thought it could be melanoma. His blood work came back the next day and was a total mess which resulted in another trip to the vet to check his blood pressure and his clotting to make sure that he could have surgery to remove the tumor.
The following Saturday Buddy made another trip to the vet to have the tumor removed. He came through the surgery really well, which was great, but it was only the beginning.
Three days later the biopsy results came back and the tumor was an aggressive form of cancer, and we were given several options to think about....surgery, oncologist, do nothing....
We had a family discussion and I was on the phone with the Oncologist later that day so that we could here all of the available options.
So on Thursday after his Saturday surgery Buddy and I found ourselves at a Cancer Clinic within the Dove Lewis Clinic seeing an Oncologist for a consultation.
Dr Freeman did the exam and gave us a list of options: 1. surgery, 2. chemo, 3. radiation, 4. melanoma vaccine. To start the process of knowing where we were, she did an aspiration of the lymph nodes a chest x-rays and the other problem was that the biopsy did not have a specific cancer diagnosis and we had to send it off to TX to determine exactly what we were dealing with. All of this takes time.
On Friday Dr. Freeman called and said no sign of spreading in the lymph nodes, nor the lungs, so now we wait for the biopsy results
On Wednesday while out for my lunchtime walk, I received a phone call from Dr. Freeman. The diagnosis was oral melanoma and an aggressive form. She recommended that we go to another oncologist over in Beaverton, Dr. Cyman for a consultation for radiation, and that I needed to move immediately because the clinic was scheduled to close in a couple of weeks. Good thing for lunch hours, by time I got back to the office Buddy was scheduled the following day for another consultation with Dr. Cyman. More scrambling and my brother Bob was enlisted in the process, so he drove from Seaside to Sandy, picked up Buddy and drove him to Beaverton and I met them at the clinic.
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