Tomorrow marks a week since Dakota had his surgery, and his lab results finally came in this morning. Just as we expected, grade 2 soft tissue sarcoma. Lymph nodes are clear, which is very good news because it means we don’t have to make the chemo decision. The recommendation now is chest radiographs every 3 months for the first year and twice yearly after that. Everyone is incredibly pleased about the results, including Dakota.
We are also slowly finding our normal around here. We have another dog, a bulldog named Evelyn. She really belongs to Dakota and I say she is his bulldog baby. This morning I was playing with her and Dakota shut it down. He hadn’t given permission for horseplay, so we had to stop. I hate it when he interferes like that, but on the other hand he actually cared this morning. So even if his normal is obnoxious, it’s his normal. Normal is pretty good right now.
Our other mini-struggles that remain are getting D to eat and getting him to pee. Eating is coming along as long as I’m willing to shell out for the expensive fresh food that comes in a tube. That won’t go on forever and the weaning will begin shortly. Peeing is a bit harder because I have no control over it. This morning Dakota showed me that his discomfort over finding a place to pee is all around that leg lift. He really wants to lift his leg and he can’t. So instead, he waits forever and goes about once a day, or once every 30 hours. I don’t like this but I can’t control it. This morning he got as close as he could to a small spruce tree and peed a few inches away from it. I imagine he will shortly learn to lean on a tree and wet it down.
Stitches are scheduled to come out next week on day 12 or 13, and then he can take off his clothes and run around naked again. Woohoo! I’m sure he can hardly wait!