Discovering the Cancer, Part 3

You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

The next morning, we received a positive update about Ella's overnight stay and asked if we could come see her again. We've always been afraid of her thinking we were going to abandon her, since that's what her first family did. She was happy to see us and we were happy to see her. Ella had her biopsy, ultrasound, and radiation for the early afternoon, so we had a bit of waiting to do. Around 5pm, Dr. Talbot was ready for us with more results. The biopsy had been a success. They'd gotten a large sample and were sending it to the lab for examination. They'd been able to get enough to put onto their own slides for their pathology unit to analyze too. After looking at them, they were almost 100% positive Ella had the histiocytic sarcoma they had told us about. However, the ultrasound had brought good news, the sarcoma had not spread, making it localized and possible to do radiation after all.

They confessed everyone was uncertain about what would happen because Ella's cancer was not present in most places histiocytic sarcoma normally appeares in dogs. It was not affecting any of her organs, but rather just sitting in her chest cavity among them. Surgery was still not an option, but Dr. Talbot seemed hopeful that radiation would do something. The best case scenario would be radiating, seeing shrinkage, and maintaining it with chemotherapy, which dogs respond very well to and normally have minimal side effects from. Either way, we knew our dog had cancer for sure and the outcome was unknown, which is scary.

Dr. Talbot suggested we do three more radiation treatments over the next three weeks since Ella had woken up from her first treatment and seemed to be doing well. We agreed and went to visit her again. She stayed once more overnight to be certain there would be no radiation side effects, but we got to return the next morning to bring her home. By 11am, we'd signed all the paperwork, scheduled her next treatments, and were in the car driving home.

It was obviously not over, but just getting to take her home seemed like an achievement. Ella is stable and doing pretty well. We're doing our best to keep her calm so she doesn't have labored breathing anymore. The first two days she slept a lot, but today she has been more herself. She's started talking to us again and we even gently played with a favorite toy tonight. She gets worn out easily, but that's ok. If I had cancer and had spent three days in a hospital, I imagine I'd still be pretty tired too. I'm feeling anxious about leaving her here during the day while we go back to work, but I think she'll be alright. She's a fighter and we're fight for her too.