Cookie Monster's battle starts Jan. 8th 2013

Cookie Monster found her wings on July 27th, 5 years 11 months and 29 days after she walked into our life.

Things were pretty good until June 11th, day of her 6th and last chemo treatment. After that the appetite kept on decreasing gradually, making it a daily challenge to find something that she would actually eat, but she still had the desire to see her friends and walk to the car and go for a rides.
We reached the point of no return around mid-July, when she simply refused any kind of food: we tried with steaks, bacon, prosciutto and many other strong flavors but she would just turn her head. One thing she always enjoied was a bowl of cold water, so we started adding some broth/steak juice to it, but that was not enought food for giving her energy and strength to support her own weight.  The last 10 days she went downhill very fast, she got really skinny/boney and lost a good amount of weight and her breathing was getting more difficult each single day. Her last night we realized that she was not able to sleep on her side because she could not breathe anymore in that position, so we put pillows on both sides to help her stay upright.
She never cried or showed us that she was in pain, but it was so hard for her to even walk 10 yards that we knew that the time had come.

On the Saturday afternoon 7/27, we got ready to go for a ride with the car (one of her favorite things), we lifted her into the back and decided to give her the 3 sedative pills we got from the vet a few days earlier, so she’d relax and buzz out and spent the following 2 hours driving by all of her parks and ponds. When she fell asleep we drove to the vet and put her on the rolling cart for her final journey. She was our only baby and we already miss her immensely.

 

We would like to wish good luck to anyone that is going thru a similar situation and thank the Tripawds community and website for all the support. If we could go back we would do everything again, from the amputation to the chemo to the bacon. She was a happy dog with 4 legs, but was also just as happy with 3.

We created a photo/video as a tribute to her life. If you click on this link, you should be able to watch it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2xim3nstbk8u0hh/Cookie%20Monster.mp4

 

 

In case you are going through this same OSA issue with your pet and are looking at what others have been going through, here below is our experience with Cookie:

 

– Dogue de Bordeaux, female, born on March 3rd 2007, spayed in August of 2007

– back right knee limp/difficulty getting up on her hind legs – ACL TTA surgery June 2011

– back left knee limp/difficulty getting up on her hind legs – ACL TTA surgery February 2012

– front left elbow limp – OSA (thankfully not present in the lungs yet at time of diagnosis) – Jan. 2013 amputation and 6 rounds of CarboPlatin with 10 water treadmill sessions from March to May: 9 good ones, while the last one at the end of May was tough, so she probably had less lung volume at that time already due to the OSA having metastasised to her lungs.

 

We only can’t help but wonder why she reacted so poorly to the last round of chemo and why the chemo maybe did not work as aggressively as we had hoped.

 

 

 

 

 

Well…..the end is near. We watched Chicago win the Stanley Cup last night but I think Cookie was with us by the TV just so she wouldn’t feel alone.

Sorry for not having any photos but the site is giving us troubles for some odd reason.

 

Cookie was doing just fine (on the outside) until her 6th and final chemo on June 11th (amputation was Jan. 8th of this year). We’d go for short/medium walks, hang out at parks until sunset and wait in the yard in the morning for our neighborhood “dog-friends” to come and visit. She’d eat with gusto twice a day and I even got to change a little bit the “secret ingredient”….actually more like the “secret food preparation method” for the two weeks that V. was in Italy at her parents’s house and it was a lot of beautiful quality time together.

On the day of the 6th and final chemo, we did a set of X-Rays and it showed she has 3 sarcoma lumps in her lungs. The vet advised to do the last chemo anyway to give her a better chance, but in hindsight I am not so sure if that did any good or if it even maybe worsened the situation. If we had not done it and she were in the same spot today, we’d be kicking ourselves for not doing it so it seems like you can’t win either way….

 

The first 2/3 days obviously she was miserable from the chemo, but she never really bounced back like she did the other 5 times. We should have known since at her last round of water treadmill exercise back in early May, she was super tired and panting, but sometimes you just look into her eyes and see that they’re smiling and they’re still bright and happy so maybe you just tend to ignore reality. In any case, on Sunday June 23rd she actually threw up her morning food for the first time and eating since then has been a challenge, to the point that she won’t even have her favorite ice cream now. We can tell she’s running frequent fevers since her head and ears get warmer in cycles, and she doesn’t do much when around the house other than sleep most of the day. Going potty is a little bit of a battle, except for when we go to the park, where apparently the “I’m sick and I don’t want to go potty” rules don’t apply….

 

The trips to the park give us a little bit of comfort, but it appears now that she has a bump/lump on her one front remaining leg and so we’re now somewhat worried that the osteosarcoma is there too. We’re fearful she may break that only leg now: if you are a QuadriPawd and become a Tripawd, it’s actually not so bad, but to become now a BiPawd and not have any front legs is not going to be a good thing.

We called the vet today and inquired about the details of how to go about ending her life in a humane way, so we’re mentally prepared (at least we think) to possibly make our final trip on Friday, but this evening she ate out of our hands some really yummy foods, with lots of “secret ingredient” so part of us is hopefully that maybe this is just a moment, but a part of us also knows that all in all it is simply downhill from here and it is just a matter of when.

As I write about this, it dawns on me that technically it is always a matter of when, for everybody and for anyone, human or animal…..we start dying a little bit each day at a time right after we’re born, but what counts is the experiences and memories we collect along the way. Hopefully we won’t be posting much anytime soon, but if we do, it will be for a good reason.

Best,

 

 

Soooo……..it’s been almost three weeks since surgery, we got the stitches out on Tuesday and did the first chemo treatment that same day as well. All in all things are well, the 48 hours after chemo were a bit sluggish so Mom invented a special “Tripawd Bone Holder” so 3LC can still chew on something and keep her balance with the other front paw.

On the weekends we have also taken to going on small road trips to her favourite places. We’ll try to do that during weekdays too but work gets in the way and it still takes both of us to lift 3LC into the car so that has been a little challenging. When we do go though it’s like seeing the parks for the first time again. Today she even did a few rolls, only to get stuck on her other side and the handle of the Help-Me-Up wouldn’t let her roll back so it took us about 10/15 seconds to realize she was stuck and needed help and wasn’t just playing in the mulch…..

A big shout out to Paolo and Hambone for motivating 3LC to go a few extra steps. We didn’t go into the park but hovered around the lake and playground area like we normally do:  I think we walked a total of about 600 yards today, which sofar is a record even though is was broken up in 4/5 legs…..no pun intended…….

3LC also “gently” snapped at Leo, one of the sweetest and most submissive Golden Retrievers we know, and his toy ball and so we kind of need to remind her that she has only 3 legs….even though she thinks she is still the Queen Bee of the park….

 

 

Here we are…..1o days after surgery and, while things are not super easy, we have had some huge improvements:

 

– Cookie (a.k.a. 3LC in the hip hop world) now gets up on her own to go potty and will wait by the door until “someone” notices….all things are finally regular so that is a big relief compared to the first few days where she didn’t have it in her to go out for a no.2 just for the sake of it.

– we are slowly weening her off the meds and that is having a big impact on mood and desire to be mobile. We are trying to do it gradually tough just to be on the safe side and to make the meds last just a little longer without having to buy new ones.

– some of the stitches are starting to come out on their own and I was kind of surprised when V. found a metal staple in 3LC’s bed. So now the FrankenScar is healing well but we can say that our dog was kind of stapled back together in some of the less important areas. Not sure how I feel about that, but I know that if I go to the hospital I’d probably hope I didn’t get stapled back together.

– 3LC is back to guarding duty: she still barks at other dogs and people walking by but does it for now from the comfort of her bed, confident that the neighborhood knows her bark and that “evil beings” will stay away just by hearing her..

 

The most beautiful thing though is when we stay with her in the evening. We will all be together and last night, as we were watching the Lance Armstrong/Oprah special, she fell asleep and started dreaming. It was obvious she was in some type of field running, but the sweetest thing was watching her dream as a QuadriPawd: she was running and jumping but you could clearly see she was moving all 4 legs, even the one that’s not there……..so we took a photo of her new “resting” pose and superimposed it on an old one:

 

 

Everybody knows it’s not there…..but it doesn’t hurt to dream and be happy like a QuadriPawd…..