a Life of Brian

Pepper’s road, like any cancer patient, has been marked by ups and downs. There are good days, there are bad days. Some days she’ll be great (like nothing was ever wrong) and other days she moves slowly.

After this last round of chemo a few weeks ago, she didn’t really bounce back from the expected down-slide that she goes through. It was concerning and frustrating because she wasn’t really showing any signs of WHY.

Then on Tuesday night I noticed that her ear was bleeding from the inside so I took her into our vet. The vet cleaned her ear out and looked inside noticing that her ear-drum was ruptured. In any other dog she would have suspected a simple ear infection, but with Pepper we kind of had to assume that tumor growth was no longer being controlled by chemo and due to it’s growth… well not a pretty picture but you get the idea.

By the next morning, it still hadn’t really stopped bleeding. It wasn’t gushing blood, just trickling ever so slightly. By our best assumptions, the ear canal was filling with blood and when it bothered her (think swimmers ear) she would shake her head loosening everything up and spraying a bit of blood on the floor, which she would then spend the next few minutes licking up. This process would then repeat.

Our attempt to wrap her ear in order break the cycle were ineffective

I took her back into the vet for the professionals to try their hand.

She was very sad and pathetic looking.

While we were sad about the head wrap and bleeding from ear, I was at the very least glad that this felt like a call to action. (rather than the waiting for her to present more clinical symptoms of what it was/is that was bothering her). So on Friday we were able to get her in for an MRI.

Road Trip:

Although the final results still need to be confirmed by a radiologist, the neurologist who did the MRI was able to give us his preliminary thoughts. And like it’s been every step of the way, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is that while there seems to be regrowth of the tumor, it’s isn’t much at all. In fact all things considered it would appear at this point that our efforts to control the growth with radiation and chemo have been pretty successful. Our initial fears that the tumor was regrowing wildly and now coming out her ear were wrong. In fact, in his opinion (and we’re not holding him to this) the area where it currently seems to be moving deeper into her head is in fact a place where “there is room for it to grow.” Meaning it has a while before it will start to compromise important structures. In his words: “… i mean, I almost don’t want to say it, but we could have years…” So that was good news, if for no other reason than it wasn’t the horribly bad news that we were kind of expected (ie. that her head was full of cancer it was pressing on everything and that her ear drum was the first thing to give out)

BUT, there is still the issue of the bleeding.

What looks to be happening is this: if one side of the tumor is slowly working it’s way further into the cranial cavity (again, where it thankfully should have room to grow) another side of it is compromising a series of blood vessels near base of the ear canal. Hence the bleeding problems that we have. We are not talking about a lot of blood, she shouldn’t go into shock anytime soon, and it’s not big enough to hemorrhage at this point. I’m over-simplifying here, but it’s just like a small cut in her inner ear that isn’t really going to heal on its own. Although rather than a cut, I think it should be thought of more like when you take accidentally cut a chunk of skin out, it doesn’t really bleed at first, but then eventually it starts oozing up and then is hard to get it to stop… like that.

We should get a better idea for what some of our options will be by early next week.

Our hope is that it will be something that they can do surgically that won’t be too invasive. I don’t think we want her to go through what she had to go through the first time she had surgery. Here is hoping that they present a solution where they are able to go in through the ear take care of the problem.

We’ll update when we know more.

The neurologist gave her a head-wrap with a little heart on it, because she’s so sweet!