Not a Smidge of Cancer

I haven't posted in over two weeks. I started a post on Friday the 15th about Valentine's Day. But it soon became moot as my week spiraled downward.

Early Saturday morning, I headed out to proctor a test, tutor a student and pick up some steak for dinner. When I returned, Spike was uninterested in the steak. Jeff said that Spike had barely stirred nor eaten all day. At least he had taken a few drinks of water. We took him to the vet on Monday and Spike underwent blood, urine and fecal tests.

When I stopped to pick up some medicine on Tuesday, I told the vet about a strange incident. Spike had toppled over for a moment when we were going down the front steps on our morning walk.

The doctor referred us to the specialist. She told us that Spike needed surgery that very night and that he had an 85 per cent chance of having cancer.

We were devastated; we'd never considered he could be that ill.

We stayed with him until he went into surgery. He had two growths in his spleen and had been bleeding internally. The surgeon removed his spleen but it didn't look good. We visited him the next day and started to talk about what it might mean if he had cancer. We wanted to make the rest of his life a good one and we were forced to imagine a future without him sooner than we had expected.

Spike came home on Friday with a plastic cone around his neck. He kept catching it on the ground as he lowered his head to sniff. Jeff told me about comfortable cones and I picked up an inflatable donut at Petco.

That evening we got the call. Spike's test results had come back earlier than expected. There was no sign of cancer (or not a smidge as I paraphrased Janie Bailey from It's A Wonderful Life in this post's title.)

The doctor had said that the surgery was curative if there was no cancer.

Bliss. More time with Spike.