Another Pappy Update.

The last few days, Pappy’s tumor has increased in size.  I’m not sure if he hit it on something or not, but it had definitely gotten large, discolored and very hard.  I noticed just how large it was last night.  I made a mental note to mention it to Rob the next day.
Rob has been deep in rehearsals for the play he is doing the last couple of weeks so we haven’t really seen each other much.  The play opened last night so I knew I would get to see him a little bit this afternoon after his nap.
This morning, Rob was crawling back into bed for his nap, just as I was waking up around eleven.  He mentioned that Pappy’s tumor was really big.  I told him I realized it as well.  He said we need to keep an eye on it and make another appointment with the vet to see how to proceed.
Just for reference sake, his tumor started the size of a small grape.  It is now the size of a medium sized apple.
So rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, thanking the universe for 12 plus hours of much needed sleep and headed out to see Pappy who was chilling in a sunbeam on the living room carpet.  He didn’t look comfortable and upon closer inspection, his tumor was bleeding.  It was sort of weeping blood in a few spots on the seam of the scar where they last took the tumor off.  Almost like it was just stretched to it’s limit and had no more give.
I grabbed the phone and called my vet.  They were only open for another hour, but they said to bring him in as soon as possible.  Thankfully, they are only a mile from my house, so I threw on yesterdays clothes, mangled my hair into a sad looking ponytail and put Paps in the car.
They took him in right away, and at this point I am a hot mess.  Not just because I literally had just gotten out of bed, but because now that they had him and I could relax for a second I started my meltdown.
Long story short, they attempted to drain the tumor but the only thing coming out was more blood.  So they wrapped it in soft cotton and wrapped that up very tightly with a double sticky ace type bandage.
The vet then gave me some antibiotics to prevent the skin from being infected, told me to keep it wrapped and check it on Monday to see if it had gone down or stopped bleeding.
Here comes the reality:
I asked the options going forward.  She said that there were two issues.  One, that we do nothing and the skin around the tumor possibly becomes ulcerated and starts to slough off, knowing it won’t grow back and then she used the U word.
The second is that we have the tumor removed for a third time, knowing that it will not stop it from coming back.  Knowing that at this stage in the game and at his age, there are risks undergoing that surgery.
I asked her to bottom line it for me and she said that in all honesty, she never thought that Pappy would be here right now.  Given the type of cancer that he has, she said that she never expected him to last this long and it is VERY rare for a dog TO live this long with an active grade 3 mast cell tumor.  Also taking into consideration that he’s still relatively happy and eating and not throwing up or showing other signs of sickness, other than old age – she basically said that we were doing all the right things.  He is still on his steroid, benadryl and pepcid.  We added the Turkey Tail Mushroom about a month ago and I added some canine hepatic support from my work for his liver when his labs came back high.
While her words should be and kind of is reassuring, it doesn’t change the fact that my little man probably doesn’t have much time left.  I’ve been really avoiding thinking about this.  Like A LOT.  The reason behind that should be obvious, but now it’s time to try and get myself prepared.  I don’t want to because just typing this out has left me in wracking sobs for the last ten minutes, but I need to start mentally preparing.
It sucks out loud.
So there is the update on my baby boy.  For better or for worse.