About Watson
As some of you may know, our sweet pup Watson was diagnosed with cancer in November of last year.
He hadn’t been eating right for a couple of weeks. A dog who used to vigorously lick every last crumb of food from his bowl gradually began eating slower, sometimes not able to finish, and eventually not eating at all. We felt like failures when we offered him his food and he would just sniff and turn his head away.
Aside from not eating, he was acting normally – playing with Penny, chasing squirrels. We took him to the vet a couple of times but were waved away with a diagnosis related to the food he was eating. Finally, I took him to an emergency vet. We were hoping for a definitive answer and I was determined not to leave until we had one. We had of course spent some time reading horrible stories on the internet, but anytime we read about cancer, we wrote it off as something we didn’t have to worry about yet – all the cancer stories we read online were about older dogs.
The emergency vet came in and said that they had aspirated a lymph node in Watson’s stomach and it contained lymphocytes. It took me what felt like forever to make the connection. “Lymphocytes…does that mean cancer?” Watson and I had been in the small exam room for around 6 hours at this point. Prognosis without treatment was 4-6 weeks. Still reeling, I called Drew to give him the news and took a few minutes to pull myself together to begin dealing with the administration that comes along with a cancer diagnosis.
The next few days were the hardest, waiting for our appointment at the NC State Veterinary Oncology department. The diagnosis coincided with a huge decline in Watson’s health. Although he wasn’t physically getting sick, it was clear he didn’t feel good. He would run around in the yard anxiously, as if something was wrong but he couldn’t figure out what. Watson usually loved sleeping in his crate, but he was terrified to go in during this time. The 4 of us slept on the couch together, under one blanket, taking turns going out with Watson whenever he would wake up.
There came a time when all the cliches suddenly made sense. The world came crashing down around me. The light went out in his eyes. It just wasn’t “him” anymore. So many of these sayings took on a meaning I never understood before.
I’ve heard before that any time you are faced with a new hardship, one of the hardest things is to face this new reality and understand that life is not going to look like the one you play out in your head. In the near term, there will be weekly oncology appointments, endless bottles of pills, the struggle of not knowing if the treatment is working and wondering if each day will be a good one or a bad one. The anxiety of going to bed and wondering if you’re going to be woken up by the pitiful whines of a puppy who doesn’t feel good and doesn’t understand why. In the longer term there are finances to figure out, treatments to learn about and choose, and the potential loss to grieve.
And then, just when I think I have my head wrapped around this new reality, my thoughts turn to Penny, and my heart breaks all over again. Sweet as can be, just shy of one year old, Penny has looked up to and loved Watson since the day we brought her home. We thought we had so many happy years ahead of us, and we have no way to tell her that Watson’s time with us could be so much shorter than we thought.
Thankfully, after being in treatment since November, I am so happy to say that we found out this week that Watson is in full remission! As awful as this experience has been, I have learned to enjoy and savor each moment I get with my sweet pups. Every time I get to look at those big brown eyes and see the life and light behind them, I’m so grateful. Every walk, mealtime, and cuddle has taken on a special new meaning, and I savor them all knowing how precious life can be.
And, the last thing. The thing I wish I had known from the start. Choices. There will be lots of them, and they will be very hard. We went to the vet assuming they would have all the answers for us, but our experience was that you are presented with options, and you have to make the decisions. We were presented with different treatments, costs, and estimated prognosis for each treatment. A typical estimate was something like, 30-50% of dogs went into remission under this method and those who did lived between 7 and 700 days. Yes, you read that right. It’s very hard to rationalize an expensive treatment with those odds, and the guilt of holding your dog’s life in your hands, and having to put a price on it, is unfathomable. Knowing this in advance might not make the choice an easy one, but hopefully it will make the process easier.
If your dog has been diagnosed, you are not alone. Below are a few of the resources I used when first researching Watson’s diagnosis, which was officially determined to be GI lymphoma (we didn’t pay for the test that determines whether it was B cell or T cell). Reader, I hope that sharing Watson’s story has helped you or anyone else out there struggling with a new diagnosis to understand what our experience was like and to know that there is hope. Lastly, a huge thanks to the NC State Veterinary Oncology department for treating Watson, and us, with kindness and compassion.
Resources I Used:
- This article about treatment costs
- This article on treatment and guilt – such a powerful story.
- This article about holistic approaches to treatment. Although we elected to do chemotherapy, I believe that the extra walks and play time with other dogs (when he was feeling up to it) was instrumental in Watson’s recovery.
- https://caninelymphoma.com