... And One Step Back

Actually, it seems like several steps back. Bullwinkle really hasn't been very interested in food the last couple of days. Yesterday he got very wobbly and weak -- I am sooooo hoping that's a side effect of the chemo -- and he's pretty subdued today. I'm not overly worried -- yet -- because we have an appointment with Dr. Kelly, the cancer vet tomorrow. She's going to do more bloodwork to see how things are going and if we should continue with the chemo. Probably needless to say, my heart will be broken if she thinks we shouldn't.

The photo above is another very early shot of Bullwinkle. He has always liked to sit on people's shoulders -- their left shoulder, to be precise, never their right shoulder. He's always been very uniquely himself, even at a very young age.

A little of the backstory: Bullwinkle's original, diagnosing vet sent him home to die -- she said nothing could be done for sub-lingual squamous cell carcinoma. I went out on the web to research it, and everything I found seemed to confirm what the original vet had said. So I settled in (very unhappily) to hospice care.

When Dr. Blackshear came to see him -- three weeks after the original diagnosis, and more than two after the biopsy results confirmed it -- she said, "Oh, I have a patient who had exactly the same thing -- and she did very well on chemotherapy." I was very skeptical but she kept pushing me -- and well, now Bullwinkle's on chemo. I have no idea whether Bullwinkle's will turn out to be a success story or not -- but I want other people to know that there are options for treating their pets. So that's one of my two goals for this blog -- to help people know what might be available. I feel we lost precious time in getting treatment for him -- and I'm hoping to help other folks keep from losing that time. (This is the place that's treating Bullwinkle, by the way.) The other goal of the blog, of course, is to keep Bullwinkle's many friends, admirers, and supporters updated on his progress.

Last night, Bullwinkle's Auntie Joyce -- our neighbor who has gone wayyyyyy above and beyond -- came over and videoed the feeding tube process. The four posts below show how it's working for us.