Send the wimps* your love…

Some of you are probably tiring of hearing about this, but I wanted to post about it here because many of you love the dog and don’t see us on a regular basis. Here’s the quick(-ish) version of the story:

Two weeks ago I noticed that the dog’s mouth was bleeding a little bit after he was playing. I looked more closely and saw an ugly looking growth behind his teeth. Fast forward a few weeks and his biopsy showed that it was a malignancy, most like a sarcoma, but his blood work and chest x-ray suggested that it hadn’t metastasized yet. We met with the veterinary surgical oncologist yesterday, and scheduled surgery for today. I dropped Walter off at the vet this morning, and he was a champ through his surgery. They removed a piece of his lower jaw, slightly larger than anticipated because the mass ended up being slightly larger than they expected, but the vet said that he thinks Walt will bounce back quickly. Walt’s staying at the puppy hospital overnight for monitoring (as expected, not because something went wrong), so please send him your love this evening and for his recovery process. We’ll be awaiting the final pathology (7-10 days from now) with baited breath, hoping that it shows that the tumor was of a sort that is only locally invasive, and doesn’t require chemotherapy or radiation in addition to the surgery. Fingers crossed!
 

Of all of the things I knew I’d have to do as a pet owner, I didn’t think that talking about code status would be one of them. The staff at the vet were good though, and made sure to ask me whether, in the case of something really terrible happening, I would want them to resuscitate the tiny Walter. Of course I said yes.

These are some pre-surgery pictures from last night and this morning. As they will demonstrate to you, the dog is in no pain at all, and didn’t even whine that he couldn’t eat this morning (perhaps because I gave him a bonus dinner at 11:00pm last night).

*For those of you not in the know, the dog has a million nicknames. His given name is Walter. He goes by Waltini, Waltez, Wimps, Wimpenstein, Wimptini, Wimpsalloo, and pretty much anything you can imagine that starts with "W."