What To Do . . .

Last week, Pudge started limping pretty badly and it wasn�t getting any better. On Saturday, Larry took him to the vet, who x-rayed him and looked the leg over. The x-ray showed a lesion on his bone unlike anything the doctor had ever really seen before. He sent the x-rays off to the radiologist and there are three possible answers.

1. Bacterial Infection
2. Fungal Infection
3. Bone Cancer

Unfortunately, if it is one of the second two, dogs don�t respond well to treatment and there�s not much else you can do. If it is the first one, we can give him antibiotics for two to three months and hope the infection isn�t too deep and goes away.

The next step in determining what the exact problem is would be to take a chest x-ray and see if there are any lesions there. Bone cancer spreads fast and would probably be evident in the lungs first. Or, we can have a bone biopsy done, which will run $600-$800. If all three choices had a good success rate of treatment, I would most likely say, go ahead and run the biopsy to see how we can beat this thing, but since 2 of the 3 don�t look good at all, I�m hesitant to spend that much money when nothing further can really be done.

Our plan of action for now is to take him to a friend�s father who is a vet about 30 minutes away, probably let him do the chest x-ray and hope that he�s seen something like this before and can give us a better answer or plan of attack.

The vet also mentioned that amputation might be an option too, but if it�s cancer, it may have spread already.

This is not something I ever thought I would have to face with an almost two year old dog. I thought we had at least 10 more years before we had to deal with losing a pet.