Remember when my life wasn’t about my dog’s bladder? ME EITHER.
But I realize that most of you love Dottie enough that you are having a long-distance love affair with her so I don’t feel terribly bad for sharing all of this. We got back to town yesterday and we still don’t have the final test results but what I can say is that the A&M vets are amazing and I love them.
They did a CT scan and at first glance nothing looked overtly cancery, which is great. They also put a camera up Dottie’s lady garden and saw the weird thickening of the bladder but didn’t see anything that looked like a tumor or lesion so they just took biopsies from different areas. Honestly based on just first looks it doesn’t look cancer but the B-RAF test they did said it was definitely cancer so who fucking knows? What they think is that either the cancer is so very early (which is good because it maybe hasn’t spread but bad because they don’t know how to treat this early) or maybe the B-RAF test was inaccurate (although it has an extremely high accuracy rate for positives) or that she has some other issue that’s causing the issue and it’s somehow presenting as cancer. We’ll know more next week but this feels like more good news than bad news so I’m going with that.
The bad news is that Dottie has been really uncomfortable at times and then with the stress of the last week and the pain she’s probably in from all the procedures yesterday she did what little dogs sometimes do in that she got scared and bit the shit out of me. And normally I’d shrug it off and be glad that she’s too small to do any real damage but I think the stress of this and of my grandfather being in the hospital with head trauma and my grandmother struggling with dementia and feeling like things were fairly dark I started crying hysterically and couldn’t stop. Luckily it was late and Hailey was asleep but I think it scared the crap out Victor (and Dottie) and honestly me too. But there’s something very cleansing about those sorts of cries and today I feel better. Utterly exhausted and unable to concentrate on all the deadlines I have looming but…I don’t know…cleaner, somehow?
I don’t have an end to this because I’m too tired to pull it all into a coherent thought but I just wanted to say that if you’re struggling right now you are not alone. And that I’m so grateful to have you listening and to have my family and to live in an age where there is help, even if there aren’t always cures. Right now my mom is dealing with so much with my grandmother and my aunt is dealing with so much with my grandfather and my grandparents are dealing with very hard cards and I wish that I could send them strength but all I can really do is tell them how grateful I am that they exist and how much I love them. And I’m grateful for you too. You, who struggle in ways that are seen and unseen. You will get through this. I will too.