Archives
January - October 2007
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April 20, 2005 - 10:42 a.m. 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 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.
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