Best wishes for Maggie. God gave us a great gift when He created dogs.

Prayers sent!!!

Well, the surgery took 2 1/2 hours and wore out my 82 year old Dad. The tumor was 7 lbs and required a 10 inch incision to remove. Wow. He said vitals and O2 levels were strong throughout the procedure, and he expects her to be coming home tonight. He said there was no evidence of metastasis, no other organs or tissues involved, so very good news so far. At her age, it's now all about the recovery.

Thanks guys so much for your kind thoughts and prayers. I was initially reluctant to post something like this, but turns out I underestimated how much your support would mean. It's hard to fathom why we love our pets so much, or how it serves any sort of purpose, but we do. We just do, and it probably makes us better humans for it. V-Tail is absolutely right, Dogs are a God given gift. Oh shit, the computer screen just got a little cloudy.....

Cancer got our golden/yellow lab mix. Glad you got good news!

quote:

Originally posted by ChicagoSigMan:
Sending positive thoughts your way! How about a picture of Maggie?

I used to post pictures all the time with Photobucket, tried last night with Imgur, but having difficulty for some reason. I'll work on it.

quote:

Originally posted by jigray3:

I used to post pictures all the time with Photobucket, tried last night with Imgur, but having difficulty for some reason. I'll work on it.

Try PostImage. I find it very easy to work with, and of course it's free.

Maggie likes her corn on the cobb



This morning awaiting surgery

So glad it went smoothly!! Way to go Maggie and family. Now HEAL
Get some rest all. And keep us posted on recovery.

Maggie is doing great! You'd never know she had life-saving abdominal surgery on Friday. Quickly becoming her old self, and adores the post surgical diet of rice and Gerber strained turkey. No infection so far, incision looks great, just one tiny spot with a little weeping, so a course of antibiotics just to be sure. In the old days, dogs wouldn't get pain meds, the thought being they don't feel pain quite like humans and that it might prevent them from moving around too much early on. The thinking has changed. Pain is now assumed, so Maggie's been getting an Nsaid, rimidyl, to make her comfortable along with a drug that amplifies the effect of the rimidyl. We opted against a biopsy. At 10 1/2 years old, chemo wouldn't be an option.

I have a photo of the tumor that I thought some of you would find fascinating, but I'm sure some of you wouldn't, so I'll spare you guys. Suffice to say it's hard to imagine that big ass thing came out of my puppy.

Thanks again for the kind support. There is great relief in the Gray household.

quote:

Originally posted by sig sailor:
We lost our last Golden to cancer and it sucks! I found out that the English style Goldens have much, much less cancer than the American Goldens. We got an English Golden. I talked to the breeder and she told me that she has been tracking her puppies for many years and not one has had cancer. Best of luck to you and Maggie. Prayer sent up.
Rod

Not that I want to instigate a thread drift, but care to point me to the source of the claim that English Goldens have less cancer than American ones?

Go Maggie!

We lost two Balinese cats to cancer, and a couple more to mysterious diseases that may have been undiagnosed cancer (shitty vets in this area). For that reason, we decided not to get a Golden since they have such a high incidence of that terrible disease.

It's great to hear that Maggie is doing well, and I pray that she gets past this.

quote:

Originally posted by Dakor:

quote:

Originally posted by sig sailor:
We lost our last Golden to cancer and it sucks! I found out that the English style Goldens have much, much less cancer than the American Goldens. We got an English Golden. I talked to the breeder and she told me that she has been tracking her puppies for many years and not one has had cancer. Best of luck to you and Maggie. Prayer sent up.
Rod

Not that I want to instigate a thread drift, but care to point me to the source of the claim that English Goldens have less cancer than American ones?

Go Maggie!

I found several popular articles on this subject myself last week, they're pretty easy to find, but here's a source abstract

Link

Best of luck to Maggie! I hope her recovery is easy!

quote:

Originally posted by newtoSig765:
We lost two Balinese cats to cancer, and a couple more to mysterious diseases that may have been undiagnosed cancer (shitty vets in this area). For that reason, we decided not to get a Golden since they have such a high incidence of that terrible disease.

It's great to hear that Maggie is doing well, and I pray that she gets past this.

It's difficult being a vet when you consider your patient can't describe their symptoms. No telling how long Maggie was carrying this tumor around, she just powered through any symptoms until it became obvious to us. If she could have told us she wasn't feeling quite right, we might have caught it much sooner. Even then, first trip in, all clinical tests were negative. It took a second trip in and my Dad following a hunch before we found it. Add to that Vets have to be good at radiology, internal medicine, dermatology, surgery, dentistry, you name it. And they only get 4 years of training, no residency, no internship, no fellowship. My brother had 11 years of medical training, but my Dad's the guy you'd want in your foxhole. A lot of vets would have just stapled that incision back together and called it a day, better ones might have used a continuous suture. My Dad triple tied 50 single subcutaneous sutures. That's as impressive as it sounds, and the medical reasons why are equally as sound.

It's also important to point out that it's generally more difficult to get into veterinary school than medical school. Most vets don't do it for the money, they do it for the love of the profession. That's not to say there aren't crappy ones, I'm sure there are, but you can make more money being crappy at something else.

Glad to hear Maggie is on the road to recovery. We lost my buddy Charlie, a mini-Labradoodle a bit over a month ago to cancer. We had no idea he had any problems until it was too late. He was my very first dog and was a great dog. I miss him.

I'm sorry for your loss, sprg03-A3. Thanks for your well wishes.

quote:

Originally posted by jigray3:
It's difficult being a vet...

Your dad sounds like he's a fine Vet, and we've had a couple of them as well.

Don't forget, though, what they call the guy who graduates at the bottom of his class.

You often can't tell which you've got, until it's too late.

Prayers and best wishes for Maggie for a speedy recovery.

quote:

Originally posted by jigray3:

I found several popular articles on this subject myself last week, they're pretty easy to find, but here's a source abstract

Link[/QUOTE]

Thanks but as that retrospective paper states, there are several important and confounding factors as to the comparative statistics... so no definitive conclusions can be drawn.