Duncan

Hello everyone.  I apologize for the fact that I have not visited your blogs and commented recently.  I will definitely do better in the coming days, if nothing else goes wrong.  We found out two and a half weeks ago that Duncan has cancer and he's going to die.  We were so shocked -- it was very hard to process.  He's only seven years old.  I mentioned a while ago that we were taking him to a specialist because he wasn't using his left rear leg when walking.  Based on what our regular vet had told us, we thought we were going to be scheduling orthopedic surgery with the specialist.  Instead we were told that Duncan has a malignant tumor in his hip and spine -- something called nerve sheath cancer, which I had never heard of before.  It's aggressive, and we basically had three treatment options.  The first was to treat with medications (steroids and pain medicine).  The second option was to have his back leg amputated, and his prognosis was six months to live.  The third choice was to have the surgery and do radiation treatments, which might give him a year to a year and a half.  These last two would be very expensive, by the way.   

        Duncan hates, hates to go to the vet; he just doesn't like being handled, prodded, and poked.  If we chose the second and third option, he would have to spend a lot of time at the vet's office.  Also, the loss of that leg seems very cruel to me.  It would be like torturing him for the last months of his life.  We chose the first option of treating him with medication here at home, which the specialist said meant about one to three months to live.  This has been hard, folks.  Sometimes it feels like just yesterday that we had to have MacDuff put down, and not long after we were receiving e-mailed pictures of baby Duncan from the breeder.     I think the worst thing about all of this is the specialist said that the pit bull attack back in January may have brought this on.  Hal and I think it did.  Duncan was a perfectly healthy dog, and that attack was a bad one.  You cannot believe how hard that dog was pulling on Duncan's leg and poor Duncan was screaming in pain.  Quoted from an online article, "Although the etiology is unknown, (the tumors) are believed to develop in areas around former injury."  Source -- The National Canine Cancer Foundation.            If we hadn't been able to separate the dogs that day, the pit bull would have killed Duncan on the spot.  As it is, we think the pit bull killed our dog anyway.  Duncan has been our most challenging Scottie; he barks a lot more when we take him out than our first two.  However, he doesn't stay outside; he's always been a house dog and only goes out on the leash to do his business.  He's a handful, but he certainly didn't deserve this.  I dreaded writing this post, but I've shared a lot about our pets here, and I try to be honest about what's going on.      I promise to visit you all soon and to make my next post more cheerful.  I hope you're doing well and having a really nice spring.  Have a good week!
Love,