3/24/16
Today I took Jackson to my vet to check-in & see what she thought about Jackson’s right leg. We haven’t seen her since January so I thought it was time to pay a visit & get her opinion. I wanted to see if we could X-ray his leg, but I didn’t want to put him under to do it as I know that would cause him more stress. Dr. K. has been great through this whole process & she has a way of putting things into perspective. She took a look at the growth that has started to grow on Jackson’s outer right leg & agreed it was time to take a look. In the last month or so the area in question would go from being swollen, to what seemed like nothing there at all. In fact I thought & hoped it was inflammation of his joint, even though I knew this was the same leg in November that Dr S. had seen signs of more cancer. I told her I would go into the X-ray room with him if this would prevent him from having to be sedated & she agreed that would be ok. So I went with Jackson & got him situated on the table & then I quickly left the room while Dr K snapped the picture with a tech and then it was done. In the next couple of moments while the X-ray images came up I waited with anticipation for what we would see on the films.
She identified that the right femur bone looked like it had moth balls in it, in fact its the cancer doing what it does best, eating away at the bone. To the left of the bone though it looked like new bone growth & I wondered is this what we were seeing by the growth on outer part of his leg. Her first thought is maybe this is the bone regrowing with the help of the Zoldronate, my hope indeed! So the next step was to send the images off to Dr S. the oncologist to see if he confered with her hunch.
Later that evening…
After getting an email response from Dr S. I’m saddened to say he doesn’t think the new bone growth is from the Zoledronate treatment. Unfortunately He confirmed that their is definitely progression of the cancer, but the leg doesn’t look like it is fractured, which is good. “The new bone growth is probably from the tumor itself, which can be both destructive & proliferative (it can eat up bone & lay down new bone where it shouldn’t be).” This was the news I definitely didn’t want to hear, so we keep moving on one day at a time!