Joules part way through his treatment for cancer
We took Joules to Terni today for his first follow-up.
The ultrasound showed that his organs and lymph nodes were fine – no signs of cancer.
However it also revealed a slight problem with his kidneys which wasn’t there at the time of the last ultrasound. It might have been caused by an infection when his white blood cell count was low due to the chemotherapy.
I was given some ‘pearls’ (gelatin capsules) of Omega 3 with vitamin E to give him – 3 a day for the foreseeable future. I won’t be able to resist jokes about swine and wisdom.
We returned home to a real mess. Kepler had somehow managed to get a book off the bookshelf and had shredded most of it with great thoroughness all over the floor. (It was a dictionary, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘swallowing a dictionary’.)
He was extremely hyperactive for about an hour, then just collapsed on his blanket under my desk and went fast asleep.
Joules of course was delighted to be back, and so are we delighted that his future looks as rosy as anyone’s can be.
Joules
We drove to Terni today to find out, once again, that Joules’ white blood cell count is too low for him to have chemotherapy.
That’s the 4th wasted journey. But he has had treatment in between and we’re now half way through the sessions: 4 down, 4 to go.
I never would have believed the whole thing would be so onerous, but I haven’t doubted for one second that we made the right decision.
Apart from anything else, Joules has been in rude health and high spirits throughout. And who could resist the little face in the photo?
We’ve just made a third fruitless journey from Valtopina to Terni (two and a half hours round trip) hoping and expecting our dog Joules to be given his fourth chemotherapy injection. It would have meant he was half way through the cancer treatment and I could believe it might someday end.
But no, his white blood cell count was so low that the line on the graph scarcely lifted its head off the x-axis. Back to the drawing board.
The drawing board involves giving him a twice-daily dose of three-quarters of an antibiotic pill. I ask you. Dividing it in half is fine; the pill was designed for that. But splitting it again … A knife makes no headway at all because there’s a smooth coating on the pill; pliers crush one of the quarters. The best solution so far is pincers.
A happy Joules in his Elizabethan collar
But the worst of it is that there are 2 pieces to give the dog. Inserting 2 pieces into a moving target (the dog’s open mouth) risks one of the pieces dropping to the edge of the tongue from where it can be spat out. The best thing is to do it in 2 goes – but that means he’s forewarned and forearmed for the second go!
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