It's good news...

...mostly.

I mean, I was thinking the best news would be if they looked at the mass and found cancer cells all tucked away neatly inside of it with huge clean margins all around.

Instead, though, they found no cancer cells. At all.

They looked at it multiple times and made lots of slides and basically chopped the mass all up looking for those spindle cells that the first biopsy results had shown - and found nothing.

I didn't even know how to feel when I heard that. First I felt relief that the worst hadn't happened - cancer cells left behind that would have been too deep for amputation to even be an option. Then I felt....&$%&$*%@*#&$@%*&#$*&$%*&#WTF. I put Abby through a major surgery in which she lost most of her gracilis muscle and a nerve and part of her adductor muscle and there WEREN'T ANY CANCER CELLS? The surgeon said there was a definite 'mass effect' going on and I agree - I felt that mass. We all felt that mass! He isn't sure why it was there - maybe it was some strange muscle sprain. To make myself feel better I tell myself maybe there was the very beginning of a tumour and that's why those spindle cells were found, and the biopsies after surgery just didn't find those cells because there weren't many yet.

I do know, though, that based on the series of events and on the information I had, I had no other options. Even if I had opted to do another pre-surgery biopsy and that hadn't found spindle cells, I wouldn't have trusted those results since the first results did show spindle cells. I basically wouldn't have trusted any other test after that first positive biopsy so my only option was to have the mass removed.

The most important part is that Abby is healthy and is healing well from her surgery. The incision looks great and her staples come out tomorrow. Her leg isn't swollen anymore and she would be running around if I let her. She seems to be putting full weight on it and she is able to jump and stand on her hind legs (although that isn't supposed to be happening at this stage of recovery!). So I'm still hopeful that she'll have almost full function of her leg.

What a mess of a roller coaster all of this has been. Can we pretend the new year starts in February please?

Little Plucked Chicken

My poor Abby girl had her surgery yesterday. The surgeon (who I really like) said he thinks he got it all but we have to wait for the pathology results to know for sure. He had to take most of her gracilis muscle and part of one of her adductor muscles. He also had to take part of a nerve that was going right into the tumour - he said this may have been the source of the tumour. He said it was a good sign that she was using her leg a bit soon after surgery...hopefully having to take those muscles and the nerve won't have done too much lasting damage.

The thing that scares me is that he said the mass was much deeper up near her pubic region than he had anticipated. If there are cancer cells left up there amputation wouldn't be an option, leaving radiation as the only next step.

Everything crossed for good pathology results...

Tough Stuff.

Abby has a tumour in her left thigh.

It all started over a month ago when I noticed Abby limping after getting home from a hike. I assumed she'd just sprained something. A few days later I walked her again and same thing - she got home, went to her bed and was reluctant to get up. When she did she was either not weight bearing or limping considerably. By the next day she seemed fine again. I decided to fully rest her for a few weeks in case it was a pulled muscle.

Then on January 3rd I found a large lump deep in her upper inner thigh. Large like...probably 4" long and oddly shaped. It felt to me like a lipoma but I'd never felt a lipoma so deep in the tissue before. This felt like it was in her thigh muscle. I decided to bring her to the vet the next day and he was stumped by it. He tried to aspirate the lump but got nothing out of it, which he decided pretty much ruled out a lipoma and an infection. He told me to exercise her to see if the limp was still present and then to bring her back in for biopsy the next week. I took her home, brought her for a walk the next day and she did the same thing - right to her bed and then acting sore for the rest of the day.

On January 10th I brought her in for xrays and a biopsy. Xrays showed that her knees and hips looked good and the vet thought the lump seemed very much like a torn hamstring muscle. I was relieved - slightly upset about the bill - but happy to hear it was nothing but a torn muscle that would take rest and rehab to heal.

Not so much...

I called to get the biopsy results yesterday and according to the pathologist "this looked like the periphery of a low grade infiltrative spindle cell tumor like schwannoma or hemangiopericytoma". "It has negligable metastatic risk, but they are usually quite invasive and achieving permanent surgical cure can be challenging".

From talking to the vet and googling it seems that the most challenging thing with these tumours is fully removing them with clean margins. Apparently it is very very difficult to get everything out particularly when they're in a limb (and Abby's feels to me like it's deeply rooted all through her thigh) and the chance of the tumour regrowing is therefore quite high. The three basic options are
1)continue removing the tumour every time it grows (and each time it grows back more firmly rooted and is more difficult to remove)
2)removal and then radiation treatments which are usually prohibitively costly and not offered very many places
3)removal and then if the tumour regrows, amputation of the limb.

This is assuming they can remove the tumour at all without significant damage to Abby's leg - which already worries me since the tumour just feels...huge and awful in there.

Until I researched it more today and got the biopsy results I was going to let my regular vet remove the mass. I think now though that I should get an oncologic surgeon to remove it. It sounds like there is the best shot at removing it entirely and preserving the limb with the first surgery so I want to make sure I choose the best option. A specialist will be much more expensive...but I need to try and save Abby's leg.

I guess I should feel lucky that this is a type of cancer that rarely metastasizes (fingers crossed) and that it's relatively slow growing but it makes me sick thinking about having to have Abby's leg amputated. She is athletic and small and would do fine with three legs but I just...can't even think about it. She loves running and jumping and her entire self is and always has been about how athletic she is.

This sucks.

Who needs fall...

When you can skip right to winter? I'll take clear skies and snow over grey rain any day.

That's why I was able to get my butt out of bed at 7:00am on Sunday to go climb a mountain. That sounds more impressive than it was since the clocks had turned back that night but still - I climbed a *mountain* before noon.

It was my first time seeing this from the lookout on the way up.

Definitely cold already!


Even though they haven't been blogged about in a long time, nothing has changed with Abby and Ryan (that's probably why I haven't blogged in a long time).

They still go batshit crazy in the snow.

Abby still hates overly hairy dogs.

Ryan's still a sweet,

head-in-a-hole,

snow-eating doofus.

And they're both still total posers.


At ages 4 and 7 they still wrestle like puppies. I'm pretty sure they'll be 17 and 20 and still pulling the same moves on each other (because they'll live to at least 30, of course).


The Portuguese Water Dogs that joined us were smart and stayed out of it at first.

This is a poor choice, PWD, a poor choice.

There are no pictures from directly after this since I was pulling Abby off of said PWD.

In true Abby form she happily redirected onto her punching bag.

I felt bad for sweet RyRy so...

I threw some snow at him. He likes it.

Until he decides to pull the super fancy "180 degree air twist" using his less than accommodating sister as a launch pad.

Once she had told him off sufficiently she demanded to show off her very own fancy snow-catching moves.

Errrrr....

Still a bitch. Still adorable.

It's a Wrap

So you know what I didn't do all summer? Write a blog post, that's what. Or use my camera much. How about a summer summary by phone pictures?

Here we go in no particular order (because who wants a summary in order, right?)

Met Piper, world's cutest puppy (rescued from Oregon)

Made some freakin' amazing pizza from scratch

Took Loic on a boat ride (complete with the claw of safety)

Went surfing in Tofino and the wasp that gave me the gift of miracle thigh that wouldn't stop swelling completed our trip trifecta of concussion and SLR dropped in ocean (each of these wonderful things happened to different people)

It was actually a really fun trip - a bunch of us stayed in a cabin with a hot tub...(this doesn't have to do with either of those things, it's just a cool picture of the sky that I liked)

and Ryan came too! He had 8 willing ball throwers and slept for days when we got home.

Before Tofino we took a family trip to Kaui...but there are no phone pictures of that so it doesn't get an entry in here.

Oh and I turned old this summer and my coworker gave me a shake weight. If you don't know what that is, don't bother looking it up. There is a picture of that on my phone but it's too embarrassing to put on here.

Speaking of turning old, Jess and I learned that we are too old for Whistler bars that cater to Contiki tours and cover you with glow paint. Important summer lesson.

Oh and who could forget the unfortunate "blonde" highlight incident?
Stay away from beauty groupons if you want to learn from my mistake.

Loic and I went on some hikes.

Ryan and Kepler were forced into cuddling.

Abby flirted shamelessly with every intact male she met and they all fell for her (who could resist, really?)

And of course the summer wouldn't have been complete without some beach trips.