Last visit to the vet?

Na'ilah with enlarged lymph nodes at her neck and in front of her shoulder

Today Na'ilah went to visit Dr. Sue Downing, the oncologist at Animal Surgery and Emergency Clinic (ASEC) on Sepulveda in west Los Angeles.

She enjoys the ride in the car and has to look at everything we pass from an open window.

But she's in the final stages of the lymphoma we discovered last July, 2018.  She was probably around four years old when we got her in 2013, so now she might be about ten years old. 

It started in the left lymph node under her jaw, and now it's "bilobal mandibular 4-5 cm" and also in the lymph node at the intersection of her left front leg and her chest "prescapular 8 cm."

Last July we had to make a choice: no treatment, watching it progress until we needed to euthanize her, probably by September--or paying for expensive chemotherapy that could give her another year or more of life.  You can guess which one we chose.

Many thousands of dollars later, she is literally on her last legs.  It's getting harder for her to breathe because the increased lymph tissue is pressing on her windpipe from both sides.  Dr. Downing says the windpipe won't constrict or collapse, but it is getting twisted.

Her liver and her spleen are enlarged, and her abdominal muscles are weakened from the Prednisone she is getting twice a day.  When she stands, her abdomen sags and looks large.  Dr. Downing says the Prednisone causes "generalized muscle atrophy."

Na'ilah's anorectal tissue is also weakened and under pressure from growth of lymphoma in the tissue that lines the rectum, so she has a 2 cm prolapse there.  It bothers her, perhaps itches--she licks it and bites it sometimes.  Our job is to put on plastic gloves, get a dab of Vaseline, and push the rectum back in, wiping her tush carefully afterward to clean off the Vaseline and blood.

Ah, the tasks of a pet owner!  If it's not giving subcutaneous hydration to a dying cat, it's tending the butt of a sick dog.

When John and I got our first dog, a black Doberman we named Typo, we were poor and didn't go in for elaborate treatment after learning that she had cancer at age six.  We just held her paw while the vet at UC Davis put her down.  That was 1978.

But now we are retired and less able to put an animal's death into its proper place in the grand scheme of things.  Na'ilah is like a child, and we pay almost anything to extend her life.

Neither Typo nor Na'ilah was a planned acquisition to the family.  Typo was born next door--actually in the other half of our duplex-- in a litter of adorable puppies, so her admission to our household was inevitable.

Na'ilah was a forlorn ridgeback standing out on a rock pedestal in monsoon rain in northern Arizona.  The story of how I got her into my car and drove her to Los Angeles is the first post on this blog, August 25, 2013.

She wasn't the first abandoned dog I had taken in.  Back in 1984 in Daly City, I'd brought home a small scruffy street dog that turned out to be one-quarter coyote.  We named her Extra.

Neither Typo nor Extra cost us much money beyond the food, but Na'ilah turned out to be an expensive acquisition.  She weighed less than fifty pounds and had a few parasitic diseases as well as Transmissible Venereal Tumor, TVT.  It's one of the earliest known forms of cancer.  She also had two BBs in her hip and a few small rocks in her stomach from eating dirt.

Our vet, Dr. Kenneth Jones, fell in love with her, and she was also a hot topic at ASEC, treated by Dr. Downing.  Los Angeles vets don't often come across cases of this cancer because it's transmitted when dogs run in packs, as some do in the Navajo Nation.  I talked John into paying for chemo that didn't help and then radiation, which cured her.  Big bucks for this rez dog.

A few months after I brought her home in August, she attacked a cat that we encountered during a walk around the neighborhood.  The cat survived, barely, but we had to pay the $4,500 surgery bill at ASEC.  Thus we learned that Rhodesian ridgebacks were bred to hunt lions.

Later she killed another cat that ventured into our back yard, but we didn't hold this against her.  It didn't cost us anything except the embarrassment of returning the corpse to our neighbor.

In her last few months Na'ilah has the pleasure of hunting a cat who actually lives in our house.  Cleopatra is a refugee cat whose home burned down in last November's fire in Malibu.  John's sister and her family are homeless and living for the moment in the house of a director who is in New Zealand shooting a film.  The director has allergies to cats, so we are cat-sitting.

Beautiful, sleek black Cleo is the joy of Na'ilah's last days.  Occasionally we find Cleo on top of a bookcase with Na'ilah trying to climb up to her, but Cleo is supposed to live upstairs while Na'ilah is either downstairs or outside with our other dogs.

Most of the time Na'ilah maintains a vigil at the foot of the staircase near the gate, waiting for Cleo to appear.  She waits for hours and is usually rewarded by Cleo putting in an appearance, rolling and stretching just out of Na'ilah's reach.

Today may have been Na'ilah's last visit to ASEC.  Dr. Downing gave me a list of vets who do home visits, including the euthanasia of a pet.  We did this ten years ago with Mocha, our shepherd mix.

Stormy and Lilyrose Serena

I say goodbye to the staff at ASEC and realize I'm going to miss my twice-monthly visits, expensive as they are.

But we still have a corgi, Stormy, and a chihuahua, Lilyrose Serena, so chances are we'll show up again at ASEC with a case that Dr. Jones can't handle.