Sparky: A Week Later

It’s been one week since Sparky’s biopsy and it’s been quite the week, sadly not for the best reasons.

Late Monday we got a call from Dr. Corriveau of the Purdue Small Animal Hospital with the results of his biopsy.  Unfortunately Sparky was diagnosed with squamous-cell carcinoma.  While the best course of action is to get into surgery to remove it, this requires very expensive imaging to determine if the cancer has spread and to determine the margin of the cancer.  After that would be the surgery which would be even more expensive.  It would most likely require removing a few teeth as well.  Taking into consideration the huge cost which isn’t feasible at this time along with how we feel his quality-of-life would be degraded, we opted for the next-best possibility.  We started Sparky on chemotherapy.

Yesterday was his first dose of Piroxicam.  It’s typically used for somewhat different areas of cancer but is promising.  The best we can hope for is that it will maintain the current cancer and not allow it to grow.  In a few weeks we will go back for another check-up.

Here’s hoping that our good boy, Sparky, gets through this successfully.  He’s a great dog and it’s hard to even think about him having cancer.