At 6 years old my parents got my sister and I two adorable labradoodle puppies, Carly and Ellie. For the past 10 years Carly has been my baby and my best friend. We did everything together. When she was around seven she started having mild hip pain, but other than that she’s been in great health her entire life. We used to joke about how Carly was a wild dog. She loved being outside and just running around. She’s never happier than when she’s outside.
On January 23 we let Carly outside to go do her thing (in the winter she has a time limit because otherwise she’ll stay out there until she freezes). She came inside limping and was in a noticeable amount of pain. Our family vet however wasn’t open so we took Carly to the Diley Hill Animal Emergency Center. Seeing was she had been so healthy we went in thinking we’d come out in about an hour and she’d be in a cute little cast. Boy we were wrong. They took multiple sets of X-rays, which didn’t seem odd at the time. The vet probably spent about 20-30 minutes looking at her X-rays before coming to get my parents Again, i thought nothing of it when they had been gone for 20 minutes.
My mom was the first one to come back into the room and i knew something was wrong because my mom had clearly been crying. That was when they told me that Carly had broken her femur due to what looked like osteosarcoma and we would have to amputate. Her chest X-rays however looked clear, which could be a good sign of it having not spread. As some who doesn’t cry, i’ve done a lot of crying.
We got to take Carly home for the weekend and on January 25 we took her in for her amputation. The surgeon said she was doing great and she came home a day later. On her one week check up we received her biopsy results, she did in fact have osteosarcoma. And immediately the vet was pushing for chemo, something we weren’t and aren’t interested in doing. The research my parents had done said that osteosarcoma usually comes with a time limit so we didn’t want whatever time Carly had left to be spent doing treatment.
On February 9 we took Carly to our family vet to have her stitches removed. On her two week check up her surgeon wasn’t giving us straight answers, so we decided to get a second opinion from our well know and well loved family vet. He removed her stitches and told us we could do chemo but with osteosarcoma it would be borrowed time. However, having looked at her blood tests prior to her amputation he said that since her level were only slightly elevated he thinks we might have just caught a lucky break (pun intended) and gotten it early enough before it spread.
As of right now, we’re simply just taking it one day at a time. We’re not doing treatment simply because theres no guarantee it will work and we want her to have the best quality of life possible. So that means lots of love, treats, outside time (when warm enough)
Being the nervous nelly that I am when it comes to her, we’re making her wear a onesie so she stays warm until her fur grows back.
