10/02/2024
Bit of a personal post here, I hope you don’t mind:
If you know me you’ve probably seen my dog Anakin at some point. This dog is the sun in my sky. A few months ago he started gradually having concerning issues that we had attributed to a new medicine we were trying, his symptoms and what other people who had complications reported matched up perfectly and we resolved to just wait for it to get out of his system.
Things got worse though and we ended up at the vet again at the end of August where they discovered his RBC was critically high, basically his blood was turning into syrup. We ended up at UGA teaching hospital where he stayed for a few days to figure out what was going on. We’ve concluded that it’s more than likely Polycythemia Vera, a rare non-metastatic cancer of the blood, but the only way to know for sure is to rule everything else out. There were some other maybe suspicious things going on particularly with his heart and possibly kidneys but the end result would be the same for treatment.
We started with trying therapeutic blood draws where he went into the vet for a day and they’d hook him up and take a lot of blood and replace it fluids but at the rate his numbers were climbing he’d need it done weekly which would be a bit invasive and expensive so we’re trying a chemo pill to keep his numbers down.
We started at a high dose 2 weeks ago and are slowly decreasing it and his numbers have remained static so that’s great! We get to go back to physical therapy today and I know he’s going to be excited to get back to semi normal things. Unfortunately he will probably be on the Hydroxyurea for the rest of his life in combination with needing occasional therapeutic blood draws but he’s a trooper!
The past two months have been honestly truly awful but I can see the light on the other side now. If you’ve read this far, thank you and the biggest thanks to anyone who’s supported my shop or even liked a post. Your support is more impactful than I can even verbalize 💜🫶