A fork in the cancer road...

K was at the hospital early, ready for her surgery. After K was asleep, the surgeon did one last xray to decide exactly where to make her cuts so she could be sure of "clean margins".

Unfortunately, the evil C was a step ahead of us. The new x-ray shows that it was now attacking both bones above the wrist in K's forelimb (the ulna and radius). That simple fact cancelled the scheduled surgery which was going to remove the ulna (because we thought that the radius was clean). K was carted to a CT Scanner to get a better look at her forelimb. It confirmed the progression of the cancer.

We had a conference with the surgeon while K was still asleep. Our options now were: a total limb amputation (which the surgeon could have done right then and there with K already under anaesthesia), stereotactic radiation, or nothing. For the moment, our decision is to do stereotactic radiation, a new procedure for killing bone tumors that has been pioneered at a few vet hospitals in recent years. It won't cure K but it will kill the tumor cells in her forelimb. She'll have her first session on Wednesday.

Just so no one gets their hopes up, the radiation will kill only the targeted tumors in the forelimb. The vets have told us that they are certain that K already has cancer cells throughout her body, and there is no chemotherapy drug that effectively kills all of those cancer cells. So, the radiation and chemotherapy will simply buy us time until she gets tumors in other places.

I'd be lying if I said that I felt optimistic right now. I'm beginning to accept that we aren't first in line for a miracle. K's cancer is aggressive and is a few steps ahead of us. I feel broken.

K comes home tonight, and we're going to make the most of the weekend. Every single day is precious.

Can you believe that I thought that K was healthy when I took the photo below exactly one week ago? Life can change so quickly.

I'm sorry that this update is so late. Today was a very hard day.