I’ve been dealing with some health stuff with our remaining pup, Shifu. I’ve shared the details with a few people, but not a ton. I didn’t want to share it widely because it felt like another plot point in my bad lifetime movie life from the last few years. I was afraid it would be seen as something I was sharing for pity or attention. But today I realized that I just can’t carry it like that anymore – it’s heavy, and hard, and my heart hurts. It’s also stirring up a LOT of feelings from when Sara was sick.
Shifu has prostate cancer. Generally the outlook for prostate cancer in dogs is not good, partially because it’s usually caught pretty late. I got “lucky” and we caught it on the earlier side – it doesn’t seem to have spread to other organs (yet). This cancer almost always spreads eventually as it’s quite aggressive. Some nSAID drugs help slow the spread of this type of cancer in dogs. With just that, Shifu was given roughly 4-6 months. With chemotherapy, we’re hoping for a year or so. I’ve opted for chemo – Shifu got his first round today. I know that it’s a huge privilege to even be able to afford this – so many families would struggle to do this for a human family member, let alone a pet. (Though, pet chemo is MUCH cheaper than human chemo, at least based on my experiences!)
When the vet tech was going over the discharge instructions today, the name of the chemo drug felt familiar. Carboplatin. I dug up an old email (since I rarely delete anything other than spam/promotional emails) and found a chemo & labwork order sheet for Sara from 2019. Sure enough – the drug Shifu is getting is one of the drugs they gave Sara. The chemo schedule is the same too: once every 3 weeks, for 6 total rounds. We have to go in the next two Mondays for bloodwork. Sara got her bloodwork on Mondays, too.
I’m suddenly immersed back in the world of caretaking for someone with cancer. Human, Dog – it’s all quite similar. Scheduling appointments, regular bloodwork, periodic scans, appetite management, instructions on avoiding contact with bodily fluids for a certain period of time after treatment… I was doing fairly well with it until I realized just how similar this all would be to Sara’s treatments, and the realization that it is the same drug was just icing on this very sucky cake.
The biggest difference between this experience and my experience with Sara is that we know Shifu is going to die. There is no talk of remission or a cure. Our treatments are purely aimed at slowing progression of the disease and giving us more time. I can’t help but wonder, given the course Sara’s disease took, how would things have felt if we had known sooner that that’s what we were doing for her, too? If we knew that we weren’t going to cure her, that she was going to die?
I’ve said before that the main thing I struggle with – the only real complaint I have relating to her medical care, is that the word hospice wasn’t whispered until it was too late, until she was already unconscious and in the ICU. What would it have looked like if her oncology team, upon her last admission to the hospital (or maybe even earlier, when it was found in her brain), told us point blank what course the cancer was likely going to take and what the odds were of meaningful recovery at that point?
Would Sara have had different conversations with people? She and I did not talk about what she wanted the end of her life to be like. If they were forthright about her chances, maybe we would have. Maybe she would have made different treatment decisions. We didn’t ask, but we were so scared. As much as that conversation would have sucked, I wish they would have told us so that she and I could have faced her death together. Instead, she gradually lost her ability to participate in her own care over the course of her last 2 weeks and I was left with around 24 hours between the first utterance of the word hospice and her last breath.
I’m going to be giving Shifu all the love I can while he’s still here. It’s not that I didn’t do that with Sara, but it’s just different, when you know well in advance what the ending is almost certainly going to be. When you’ve said the words out loud. While my heart aches at the thought of Sara and I looking at each other, talking about her eventual death, I would’ve rather had that story than the one we ended up with.
For those who read this and know me/interact with me in real life, my head and heart may be in a weird place for awhile – I appreciate you all.
