Continue reading »]]> I had a rather optimistic post written but after the news I deleted it. If you haven’t been following me on Google Plus,¹ you know Spike’s been sick lately. I dropped him off at the vet today and the news turned out to be very bad.

His hacking cough turned out to be much worse than we thought. What we thought was an infection turned out to be a mass large enough its already compromised 2/3’s of one lung and part of the other. Basically, he has cancer. The vet seemed a little surprised he was doing as well as he was. The irony is I was afraid he did. I don’t know why I thought that, I just did. Even worse, due to his age and the severity of the mass, there is very little to be done. We could pursue very aggressive treatment but even if they did get all the cancerous tissue, he’d end up w/very little lung left. So in a nutshell, he has weeks maybe months left to live. Our focus now is to just keep him as comfortable as possible. The vet gave us some pain meds for him which should also help suppress the hacking.

I’d like to thank everyone who texted, emailed, tweeted, posted, etc with well-wishes. He is home and resting at the moment. He is still very groggy from the sedation at the moment and keep wobbling around. It would be comical if I wasn’t so upset.

When I dropped him off earlier, he knew something was up. He was so well-behaved but he had such a pining look on his face. When I picked up, I was already fighting back tears. Coming into the treatment area, I saw him before he saw me. He was so distressed and anxious. The moment he saw me, even as doped up as he was, he tried to come to me. He was so sedated he only managed to flop over a couple times and roll out of his cage. God love’em. Even in his haze, he knew me and wanted to get to me. This of course only made me cry more.

We took him to the SPCA veterinary clinic and the did a good job. The doc was so sweet and treated him well. She obviously liked her job. Most of the staff were pretty involved as well. There was one douche who didn’t really seem to care…well until I snapped at him for being nonchalant about me going back to see Spike. I would have grabbed him by “his” scruff and given him a good shake. He got the hint and got the hell out of my way.

I’m trying to keep it together. I still have time w/my Spika-doo for a while longer yet and I’m trying to be content with that. Continue to keep him in your thoughts and send him good energies.

1. and you should because I’m eventually ditching Facebook and maybe event twitter