Finally got the results on the biopsy. It was inconclusive. Wasn't for sure benign and wasn't for sure cancer. Good news though is that they saw clean margins all the way around, just as the surgeon thought. So benign or not, looks like he got it all and so we are happy with that. So now it is whatever will be will be but things look good for her being 13 yrs old. Only problem now is that one of her many fatty tumors is appearing to start to bother her. It is under the front leg and she seems to be holding her leg out a bit, so she may be in for more surgery. We opted to leave it alone before but now it appears to be bothering her and so we might have it removed. Poor girl has had so many surgeries of one type of tumor or another. We've pretty much left fatty tumors alone, unless they were starting to cause problems, but she's had a a couple of suspicious tumors we had removed and there have been a few fatty tumors that started to cause her problems. At one point one of the technicians had told me that she wasn't going to put her under again. That didn't happen though. She's always bounced right back from all of them but it is harder and harder the older she gets and she is 13... a young 13.
Update: Met with the surgeon this morning. When he found the lump, he asked me how in the heck I found it. It was small and kind of under a muscle. He told me that his dog could have a lump like that and he wouldn't have noticed it. I guess since this is number 3 dog, with a tumor in the area of the thyroid and combined with some luck, is why I found it. I left her for him to do surgery in the afternoon and he called me right after the surgery. He was very pleased with the way things went...said it was pretty straightforward and no problems. Said it is definitely a thyroid tumor. Biopsy will tell us if it is cancer or not. Even if it is, it's looking like everything should be okay. Not like what he saw when he did the surgery on our other dog, back in 2009. He, like our regular vet, is just pretty much blown away that I've had this now with 2 dogs right in a row and then the other several years back. I should be able to pick Summer up tomorrow. I called the girls tonight and they said she was getting a bit anxious but she gave her some more pain meds and then she settled down and was just settling in to sleep. They have someone stay with them right around the clock.
Thyroid cancer is supposedly very rare in dogs. Well, we just lost one of our dogs almost 2 weeks ago now. She had surgery for it almost 2 years ago and then radiation treatments. The two years after surgery she did very well. Last year I even entered her in a class at an agility trial and she was 12 years old then. The last couple weeks or so, before we put her down, she started having these panic attacks, similar to when there would be a thunderstorm. I finally could get her calmed down by putting her is a small room with no windows and just leaving the door open but tying her and blocking the door way, so she wouldn't strain to try and get out. She also started coughing more after drinking and it also seemed that she was having a harder time eating her food. And I hate to say this, as other people are having problems with it, but we really thought hers was most likely either the cancer returned somewhere else, or she developed cancer as a result of the radiation, which we knew was a possibility. She had started with having head twitching. I just looked at a bunch of the videos on it up on U Tube and those looked more like tremors, while hers I'd say was more like twitching, if one can think there might be any difference. Anyway, that was just one more of the several reasons we decided to let her go and these were all based on her history as well. It hasn't even been two weeks since we lost her and I take our other old dog in to check on some lumps. She's a lumpy, bumpy old girl and most are fatty tumors. She did have one removed that was a type of cancer that could return locally, but the vet was sure he got all of that. She has had several others removed, which had started causing problems for her, but still has several more. One I found just the day before I took her in and it was a small lump on her neck...same area typical of the thyroid tumors. Well, Vet did a needle aspirate and saw suspicious cells, so he did another and sent it out to Pathology. Pathology report comes back that it is suspicious for thyroid cancer and suggests a biopsy. So Monday we see the surgeon (all this vet does is surgery's) who did the surgery on our other dog. The vets are totally surprised and just cannot believe that I can have 3 dogs that have had thyroid cancer. The other dog was back in the early 80's and we took him to Cornell for the surgery. They were able to totally remove the tumor with him and he did fine, until he got a totally different type of cancer several years later. If you have made it this far in reading my book, I'd just like to know if you or anyone you know has had a dog with thyroid cancer. I won't know for sure about Summer's tumor until they send a biopsy out but it is pretty next to certain that is what it is. Thanks for reading.