To preface: Lincoln's a happy dog - jumping off the patio to go chase things, sleeping most of the day, stealing (and eating) a loaf of bread from the bread box (which was on the counter and closed!) every chance he gets.
He doesn't know there is anything wrong with him...except he coughs a couple times a day. If you want the bottom line first, skip to the bottom of this paragraph . If you want the whole story, read on. He coughed occasionally last summer, then stopped (whether that's related or not is unknown.) About 3 months ago we noticed him coughing again, in the the last 6 weeks it had progressed to being a couple times daily so I took him to his wonderful vet. She was thinking allergies, but we chose to do an xray - it showed a significant white area (dense things like organs and bones show up white, air- like healthy lung - shows up black.) She said it was out of her realm to diagnose and sent us to the vet specialist. The specialist looked at the xrays and said it was a tumor. (For those of you who have seen the huge fatty tumor on this shoulder/chest -that's not it. This one is in his lung -inside his chest.) In order to know what kind of tumor, he needed an ultasound guided biopsy (using an ultrasound - how they look at babies - to guide the needle to get some cells from the tumor - kind of like drawing blood, except from the tumor instead of a vein.) The ultrasound showed it is about 9cm ~4inches. The results came back yesterday. He has a carcinoma. Cancer.
She said the definitive cure is surgery to remove that lobe of his lung. That's very painful for humans and while I don't know how much it would hurt a dog, I can't imagine it's comfortable and if it has metastasized (spread) it wouldn't do anything about the other places. Plus he's a pretty old dog. He'll be 9 on October 24th - which is old for a 115lb dog. Surgery is big ordeal - especially the older you are. For these reasons, we decided that was not the best option to keep him the happy dog that he is now.
The next best option in her opinion is a couple drugs (we also chose against chemo due to the side effects - once again the goal to keep him happy) that have minimal side effects and may or may not work to keep the tumor from growing or possibly shrink it. One is an antibiotic that also keeps new blood vessels from forming - essentially cutting off the nutrition to the tumor. The other is a pain medicine that is also an anti-inflammatory and apparently has properties that protect against cancer - so it may attack what is already there or keep it from getting bigger. We'll give him these for a while, then do another xray to see if anything has changed, then decide to continue them or not. She was reluctant to say how long until he's symptomatic other than an occasional cough, but did tell Andy that there were lots of dead cells - which means it has probably been there for a while and it fairly slow growing. Our regular vet has a doggy radiologist friend that she's going to do an unofficial consult with and get a second opinion to make sure that this is the best option.
This post is the best I can do to talk about it for the moment, but I keep telling myself (and you) that Lincoln is his regular, happy self and just wishes that we'd stop giving him bad haircuts and poking needles in him. Which is true.
