Two steps forward, one step back

Well, sadly bad news is bringing me back to the blog today. I'd been planning to update with a photo of Guinness with Snickers, and to report he's been doing well, but recently things have changed.

About 10 days ago we left town for a trip to Philadelphia and my dad came to house and critter sit for us. When he arrived he called to asked if Guinness was ok. He thought he seemed not quite himself. This was after several days of playing with Snickers, and I was hoping it was due to that, and possibly because Guinness had to watch (sadly) as Brett and John and Snickers got into a car together and left him behind to leave for Philly (my sister and I had gone ahead a day early with the kids). That had to have been a bummer for him when that happened (I had a moment of sadness when I realized this, and it was a hard week being away from him).

I hoped that this was what my dad was detecting, but on our return, I noticed the same. He was quiet, not as bright-eyed, or perky. His early were low, which is a sign something is not right with him. Brett also noticed that in the morning when he fed him, that Guinness was picking at his food rather than gulping it down as fast as possible, which is very much not like him. So warning bells were going off in my mind all over the place.

This was Sunday/Monday, and he was due for his third round of chemotherapy Thursday (yesterday), but by Tuesday I felt something was amiss. I called our doctor at OSU and said I wasn't confident that he was able to handle treatment, so we discussed me bringing him in locally to ACOC for a visit. This was after hours so I was planning on taking him to the clinic the next day, but early the next morning Dr. London called and said to just bring him down to OSU so they could have a look at him.

We arrived this morning with hopes that after an exam to rule anything out he would be receiving treatment, but a little over an hour after dropping him off Dr. London called and said that Guinness's white blood count was very high, and his red blood cell count was very low. This meant he was anemic, and his immune system was heightened. She began to search for the root of the problem, and the first thought was to look for a mass. I began to fear the worst that the cancer had spread. So I waited for another phone call, but (thankfully) that was ruled out via ultrasound and abdominal xrays.

She then promised to call back after looking deeper into things to see what was going on with him. I got another call asking if he had eaten anything toxic, been bitten by a tick, anything out of the ordinary, trying to rule out toxicity or possibly a blood bourne illness. Nothing fit.

Finally I received yet another call, and they had pretty much pin pointed the problem to a very rare reaction to the one chemotherapy drug, carboplatin. In a very small number of cases it has been reported to cause an auto-immune reaction, and Guinness happens to be one of them. The good news is that there is a very big possibility that a week of prednisone should reverse this by suppressing his immune system (since it is currently over-active). He will also need to be kept quiet so that he can bounce back from the anemia. The bad news is that since he's had such a severe reaction to the carboplatin, he can no longer receive it, and therefore can no longer part of the study.

At this point we will be monitoring his counts making sure he is rebounding, and if he does as hoped and expected, he will be receiving another type of chemotherapy drug called doxorubicin.

I will update further as things progress...today he received a prednisone injection and tomorrow he begins taking it via pill form. Monday he will have a blood draw to see if he is improving. If so, and it is at an acceptable level he could be receiving treatment (the doxorubicin) as early as next Friday, a week from today (well, yesterday now).

Right now he's sound asleep in his bed...he's hanging in there. Even this morning before leaving, while feeling so depleted he still had the drive to run over and charge our neighbor to say hi when we went out in the front yard. It's the inner Pirate Pup in him.

More to follow...