Snow Day!

Today winter finally decided to arrive and give us some beautiful snow :) Holly and I enjoyed a wonderful hike along the creek together during the heaviest snowfall. Even though she spent the whole hike ripping around the woods off leash, she still enjoyed a good after-hike zoom around the yard. Today's snow was the perfect way to start my Thanksgiving week vacation :)

Muckin' Around the Woods

The last few weeks have finally slowed down and, despite the rain and lack of daylight, I have found my way out of my work truck and back to the woods. With her bum knee, Holly can't hike for too long but we are enjoying every little moment we can find out there. She's also starting to show a lowered white blood cell count due to the oral chemo, so I have to be careful where I let her off leash. She's infamous for finding rotten deer legs in the woods and then refusing to give them up. She really can't afford to be making herself sick over rotten festering wild meat these days...or any day for that matter. When it comes to things she finds in the woods, her 'Leave It' has always been broken. Sigh.

Winter is finally starting to show itself...Danee's readily lets me know that it's "too cold for a walk" by refusing to leave the yard, especially if I haven't put a coat on her. Wussy dog ;)

All 4 critters went to the vet last week for their annual exam and blood work. Kitties liked the trip not at all. Poor kitties. It's hard to realistically prepare them for an hour plus drive to the vet. Kya is perfect, as is Danee. Kettle has low potassium and her blood work showed how traumatic the whole event was for her. Poor Kettle took a few days to recover from it all.

Holly still looks great. Her knee isn't really healing, but despite that it's quite stable and she only limps on it at night. So we're just going to continue with what we've been doing...shortened walks/hikes and on leash as often as is practical for her brain and happiness, NSAID's at night when she shows me she's sore, and acupuncture every 2-4 weeks. Her WBC is getting progressively lower, but it's not low enough to change her oral chemo drug regime yet. She is still doing wonderfully on the oral chemo...aside from the decreased WBC, which affects her outwardly not at all. And still no visible sign of the sarcoma tissue returning in that leg. However...she has been licking that leg recently, so something may be happening there that we just can't detect yet.

Happy 10th Birthday!

Celebrating a milestone today...Holly's 10th Birthday! The girl is still rocking it...4 months on metronomic chemotherapy and no sign of the cancer returning :) I am so very blessed she is still healthy, and still with me.

It stopped raining just long enough to get a picture of her and her cupcakes outside, and before she devoured half of them.

Happy Birthday my Girlie :)

Holly's Very Last Agility Trial

This weekend the dogs and I visited our agility family at a local trial. This was my first 2 days in a row off of work in almost 2.5 months...and my god did I need the break. We didn't stay at the trial for long...just a few hours in the afternoon on the first day. I went to socialize, I went to cheer everyone on, I went to lend a hand, I went to see some long lost friends, and I went to run Holly in her last course ever at an agility trial.

The run itself was nothing special...I only let her run an Intro Tunnelers course...but it was a bittersweet moment for me. She is currently healthy with no sign of her cancer since we started metronomic chemotherapy 3 months ago. But know that won't last. There aren't any agility trials until spring of next year, I don't have a lot of faith that Holly will still be with me then. So, I called it. She ran her retirement run among friends where I could shed a few tears over it.

We enjoyed the rest of the fall weekend at home cleaning up the yard before winter and getting in a short hike and some nice walks. The fall colors are gorgeous and the crisp weather is superb.

Every Day is a Gift

We've been busy this summer. Busy having fun and clearly not posting about it on the blog. Since I joined Facebook, I find it hard to update the blog. Facebook is easy...too easy...to post a quick photo or a quick story. Whereas, I have to find the time to sit in front of m y computer to post an update to the blog. So, not really an excuse for a lack of posts, more of just an explanation.

The last month has been a busy one. In late July Holly and I took a mini vacation and a road trip. A summer vacation is very unusual for me due to my job. But fun times with Holly while she is feeling good take precedence over everything this year, so I made a quick plan and took off.

I took Holly to Yellowstone Dog Sports in Red Lodge Montana for 2 days. What a super cool place! It's truly Dog World heaven. But we were not there for sports (although we did fit in 2 fun NADAC agility runs one evening), we were there to have Alanna Leach with Alanna Leach Pet Photography photograph Holly in a studio setting. I was in awe of the photos I had seen of hers earlier in the year and was able to plan a camping trip around having her take photos of Holly. She captured Holly's personality perfectly and I am so honored to have had this opportunity. The 4 photos below are my favorites...they are SO Holly :)

After our photo session was done, we took off to camp in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana and Wyoming. I have been wanting to go there for several years, but it's a very long drive (over 10 hours) just to get to the northern portion of the Beartooth Highway that I had kept putting it off. I'm glad we went :) The mountains, plateau and even the highway are absolutely stunning.

The road goes south from Red Lodge, Montana into Wyoming and winds it's way up to nearly 11,000 feet at the pass. We camped at about 9,500 feet at one of the several National Forest Campgrounds. Holly has never tent camped with me...having space issues, she was not a fan of my small backpacking tent so I never took her backpack camping. But since we were car camping, I bought a huge family sized summer tent and she was fine with it. In fact, she rocked car camping in a public campground like she'd been doing it all her life. She even made 2 friends...I got to chatting with two guys that were there for the fishing on our first day, and they stopped in several times a day to say hi, give Holly a cookie and a good scratch behind her ears. It was too cute. We stayed several nights and enjoyed exploring the area each day before taking off for home, going through the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park on the way.

It was an unforgettable trip and I am so happy I took the time to do it with Holly.

Unfortunately, the second I got home, work exploded and I spent a week working 12-15 hour days before my parents arrived for a 3 week visit. At the same time, the wildfires took off...we now have over 50 on our National Forest alone. It's been nuts. But we did fit in a few fun things when the smoke eased up for a day or two.

Currently our air quality is listed at Hazardous and more weather might bring in more fires. But we are currently safe and doing well.

I continue to be shocked with how well Holly is doing. She's on the metronomic chemotherapy and the minor side effects I saw in the beginning are gone. She's happy, bouncy and full of energy. The tumors in her leg have visibly disappeared and aside from buggering up her left knee, she seems pain free. This time with her is such a gift.

Annual Trek to a Lookout

As part of my plan to do something special with just Holly once a week, her and I made our annual trek to one of the Lookouts on the National Forest rental system. This is the Webb Mountain fire Lookout on the Kootenai National Forest. The lookout is perched at 5,988 feet atop its namesake mountain. Built in 1959 it was used as an observation point for fighting forest fires for over 40 years. Now many of these Lookouts have been decommissioned and are available to rent by anyone who can get there. You can drive to this one if you have a high clearance vehicle, but several others are hike in only.

I have been trying to rent this particular lookout for several years, but you have to book very, very early and I kept missing that window. I finally got lucky this year and got the last open day that was available for the entire summer.

I was a little wary on how much fun we would have because June weather had been Arizona-like...disgustingly hot (high 90's) and incredibly dry. But it ended up only in the high 80's, and by the time we got to the top of the mountain the temperature had dropped a whole 20 degrees.

It was cloudy, hazy and the air was filled with smoke from forest fires in Canada, but the view was pretty none-the-less.

Holly and I explored the mountainside...she hunted for ground squirrels while I hunted for huckleberries. Neither of us were particularly successful.

 The night got cool enough that I decided a fire in the stove was needed. It stormed in the distance all night and finally brought us some much needed rain by the morning. It was a lovely night and I am looking forward to our visit to different tower later this summer.

Devastated

It took me awhile to write this post, because I haven't wanted to put it in writing and make it real. In fact, I haven't even looked at the blog in weeks because I couldn't deal with how sad it made me.

Holly's cancer has returned. It took less than 4 months for it to grow back post radiation treatment. I am beyond devastated.

A little over 2 weeks ago I noticed another hard lump on Holly's leg, just below where the last one was. I had been working to shed out her coat and had been brushing her every other day. The lump was not there when I brushed her 2 days prior. I immediately began discussions with her vets. It's a long story, with many emails and conversations between us, but ultimately we chose not to disturb the tumor again. Myxosarcoma's are already aggressive growers, and every time you disturb them they become even more aggressive in their growth. An aspirate or biopsy is disturbing it, so we chose to leave it alone.  Granted, because of this we cannot be 100% sure that it's a myxosarcoma...but, then again, given the location, history, and that it looks and feels exactly like the last one, what the hell else could it be? Both her oncology vet and regular vet agree there are very, very, very few other possibilities.

Knowing whether it is a myxosarcoma or a benign cyst doesn't change treatment options anyways. The oncology vet gave us 2 treatment options. The first being the metronomic chemotherapy that I chose to not do earlier this year. The second was injecting the tumor with a chemo drug and adding en electrical current...her regular vet can not do this and we would have to make multiple trips back to WSU for treatment. The third option was a more traditional intravenous chemotherapy treatment that had serious potential side effects that I did not want her to go through.

The second and third treatments are far more invasive and intense than I am willing to put her through again, especially since I do not believe this cancer can be cured anymore. The radiation treatment was intense enough. And I chose the radiation treatment when the cancer first showed up because we believed we had a good chance at eliminating it. If this "Gold Standard" treatment didn't work to cure it, then these won't either. They will only buy her a little more time. Time that I would rather spend doing fun happy things with her, and not getting treatment or recovering from treatments.

So this weekend she will begin metronomic chemotherapy that she will take daily, for the rest of her life. No one can give us a time frame on how long that will be. The metronomic chemotherapy could do absolutely nothing and we could only have a few pain free weeks left before the tumor grows so large that it totally debilitates her, or it outgrows it's blood supply and becomes necrotic. And it IS growing fast. It's larger now that it was just 2 weeks ago. That's the nature of myxosarcoma's. Or, the chemo drugs could really slow the tumors growth down so that we have months, possibly even a year, before all that happens. We have no way to predict, or even guess, how this will go.

I am glad that I have been treating this as our last summer together since she healed from the radiation. We had a lot of fun, have done a lot of her favorite things, and I've been doing one special thing a week...just me and her. And I am planning more of the same for as long as she enjoys doing them. We hiked to a few new places, swam in a few new ponds, rented a retired fire lookout and enjoyed a night on top of a mountain. At the end of the month I'm taking her on a road trip to get some professional photographs taken of her and visit the Beartooth mountain range. I'm also looking around for someone to video all of her many tricks and skills and create a nice compilation for me.

I am heartbroken that our journey together will be over too soon. She's been with me less than 6 years. It's not nearly long enough.

In The Clear!

Yesterday Holly got chest X-rays. It was part of the monitoring the oncology vet recommended to determine if the cancer we killed ended up spreading to her lungs despite our best efforts to prevent it. So far, she's in the clear! The leg looks good and the X-rays were clean. We can finally take a break from our frequent vet visits and wait a whole 6 months before checking her again! Bring on a worry free summer, I'm ready! 

Agility!

On Memorial Day I was able to take a whole 36 hours off of work to visit my sister. We decided to go play for a few hours at a NADAC Trial near her. Holly isn't quite 100% yet, even 3.5 months after radiation treatment, but she's doing really doing great and having fun. So I let her run in 3 classes and, rusty handling and all, she suprised me by eeking out a Q on an easy Elite Chances course. I really miss playing agility with this girl.

 

Hiking Buddies

I take the dogs hiking, or at least on a ramble through the forest, almost daily as our primary source of fun and exercise. Holly is still trying to recover back to her pre-radiation level of fitness, so for the last month I've been keeping it short...no longer than 2 hours, and changing what kind of terrain we hike on each day...trails, hillsides, uphill, closed forest roads, etc. She's slowly gaining her stamina back, but with it come the aches and pains of getting back into shape. Danee, on the other hand, is one lean mean fit machine, and is part Forest Sprite. She could hike all day long.

That said, our daily hikes are mostly about having fun, being in the woods and doing something fun together. I cherish each day Holly remains cancer free, and am not taking a single one for granted.

Celebrating Earth Day

Seeing life through the eyes of a wildlife biologist, every day is earth day to me...except that today, I brought my good camera on our evening hike.

And since I had the good camera out, I tried to get a few decent photos of Danee.

I've been so focused on Holly these last few months, that I thought that I would at least focus my camera lens more on Danee tonight. It was a good try.

Even in Death, There is life

Last week my friend was burning a large slash pile and it got away from her. Before the firefighters could come and put it out, it had burned half of her field and was teetering on the edge the forest. Scary! But for some wonderful reason, the fire went completely around Casey's grave at the top of the field, preserving the beautiful spring flowers that just came in bloom. Casey is growing some lovely flowers this year. Even in death, there is life :)