Liver wurst
Yuki’s third round of Cytoxan began this week, but it almost didn’t happen.
Yuki’s liver values were still going in the wrong direction when he was tested before his chemo. This brought on a “all hands on deck” situation at the Oncologist’s office as they decided to find out what was going on before continuing the chemo. Yuki got his belly shaved (again) and they did an ultrasound to see if there was visible signs of tumors on his liver; thankfully there wasn’t. They then decided to do a cytology on Yuki’s liver to see if there is cancer inside his liver. The tests just came back and thankfully the pathology showed no sign of lymphoma within Yuki’s liver.
The good news, then, is that his treatments can continue without making and changes to the chemo drugs. The bad news, to me anyway, is that we still don’t know what’s causing the liver numbers to trend into the region of “bad”. One oddity is that when they tested his liver numbers in the morning, they were so high the Oncologist wasn’t going to administer the Cytoxan. Then, apparently, they tested the liver numbers again later in the day and they were fine. The Oncologist went ahead with the chemo treatment.
How weird is that?
We were very strict in the week preceding to make sure Yuki only ate food and snacks for dogs and no “treats” of human food. He was also kept to his fasting rules before the chemo visit too (no food after midnight). Perhaps we’ll need to make sure he’s fed earlier in the evening before his chemo day and then put the food away thus extending his fasting hours and see if that affects his liver values.
In other Yuki news, he’s having a really tough time this winter with his hip. He’s getting to the point where he barely puts any weight on his back left leg. This is usually when he first gets up after sleeping. He’ll tend to start putting more weight on the leg the longer he’s up and moving around, however, but I wonder if it’s just the cold weather or if he might have damaged or seriously aggravated/inflamed something. Of course, the most likely reason for his lameness is simply age and progressive degeneration of his hip joint by a combination of bone-on-bone friction and mounting arthritis. This situation has increased Yuki’s reticence to climb stairs which has become an issue at night when the family heads upstairs to bed. He’ll wait an hour or more and then start attempting to climb the stairs. More often these days one of us has to get up and walk with him up the stairs. He can still do it, and he doesn’t have to be handled in any way, so this seems to be more of a confidence issue on his part.
This last weekend, instead of taking Yuki to the groomers for a nail clipping, we ground his nails ourselves for the first time using a Dremel dog nail grinder that Mom purchased. It was a lot easier to do than I thought it would be. Mom held Yuki lightly while I ground his nails down. Sure he was a bit skittish at the strange sensation but he wasn’t as adverse to the task as I thought he would be. Being so sensitive to strange sounds I thought sound of the grinder alone would make him run for the hills.