Discovering the Cancer, Part 2

If you haven't yet, you can read part 1 here.

We arrived in Gainesville at 3:30am. The Small Animal Hospital's emergency room was been expecting us and had a kennel ready for Ella. We handed over the x-rays and forms from the emergency vet for the on-call doctor (Dr. Koontz) to review. Ella needed a CT scan, but we'd have to wait until morning to do it since the scan isn't available so late at night. In the meantime, they would take blood and urine samples from Ella and monitor her overnight. When we took her to the intensive care unit where her kennel was, she caught on that we'd be leaving her there and got frightened. It broke my heart to see her so confused and scared.

By the time we left it was 5am. There was no point in checking into a hotel room since the hospital opened at 8am, so we slept in our car in their parking lot. Or tried to, at least. At 8am, we got a call from the ER saying they'd been able to collect the samples they needed and had transferred her to the Oncology unit. Later that morning, Ella was cleared for anesthesia and had a CT scan and biopsy of the tumor done. The hours passed so slowly. When the CT scan was completed and Ella woke up from her anesthesia the Chief of Oncology, Dr. Bacon, came to talk with us. He was honest with us, which I always appreciate, but it was hard hearing what he had to say.

At this point Ella more than likely had thymoma or lymphoma. Thymoma can be treated with surgery or radiation and Lymphoma can be treated with just drugs (chemotherapy). However, Ella's tumor was so large and appeared to encompass the arteries leading to her heart, so surgery was not an option. Dr. Bacon said they would more than likely not be able to get all of the tumor because of it's placement and surgery would be very risky in the first place. Lymphoma was our best hope because it responded very well to chemo and would pretty much melt away. Unfortunately, we could tell they were leaning in the direction of thymoma. We were still waiting on the results of the biopsy though and those would confirm what the tumor was.

Around 5:30pm, the biopsy came back. Dr. Talbot had been assigned to Ella and came to give us the news with Michael Liu, a graduate veterinary student. (UF is a teaching hospital.) They didn't think it was thymoma or lymphoma. Instead, they were most certain Ella had a rare type of cancer in dogs called localized histiocytic sarcoma. In order to fully diagnose her with this, they would have to take a larger biopsy and send it to a lab for examination. We consented for her to have this done first thing in the morning, along with an abdominal ultrasound to make sure the cancer had not spread. Dr. Talbot also proposed giving Ella a radiation treatment to try shrinking the tumor. Since we had nothing to lose really, we told them to do it. She stayed overnight again for monitoring, but we got to see her before we left. It was the happiest 15 minutes in the last two days for us.