squamous cell carcinoma...eeek
so travis, my scottie dog, had surgery last tuesday to amputate his dewclaw. it was all big and red and draining pus and the nail was all funky and curved. jeanne, one of the doctors that i work with did the surgery and i was the technician in the OR. everything went fine and i took him home on tuesday after work. since then he is walking on it really well and even going up and down stairs on it! he has been taking buprenex twice a day since tuesday too to help w/ the pain.
but when i went to work on saturday (11/6) another doctor, leslie, that was there when jeanne was operating on travis pulled me aside and told me that the histopathology report came back on the dewclaw. the histopathologist said that it was squamous cell carcinoma (a type of cancer) and that we didn't get clear margins with the amputation. so the options are to go in and take the carpal bone (P3) out that connects the dewclaw to the carpus (paw) to get a clear margin, or to leave it alone. travis will be 14 years old on march 1st...and he is very sensitive to pain. going into surgery again would not only be an even bigger anesthetic risk, but would be very invasive and painful. with him doing so well now and being as sensitive to pain as he is i think that we are going to leave things alone. the cancer hasn't spread anywhere else...we took a chest x-ray and leslie said it looked good and he seems ok otherwise.
so i think my mind is made up...we are going to leave poor travis alone. i have to talk to jeanne about things on tuesday when i go to work. she is going to take off the bandage and check out the incision and put a new one on. we have been doing bandage changes every 2 days since the day of the surgery and the paw has been doing ok. so yeah. he's doing good now and we are going to live day to day...
on a lighter note...i'll post a picture of travis soon with his leg bandage and e-collar around his head (so he doesn't bite off the bandage). he looks cute...
posted by JupiterVet @ 8:09 PM
3 Comments:
Wow Catherine! I realize you dealt with your dogs situation awhile ago, I have been struggling with deciding which way to go, here let me explain, my dog Teddy is an 11 year old Black Russian Terrier Two days ago, Teddy was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. The biopsy was taken from a golf ball sized tumor removed from his lower left front leg, basically I was told after it's removal that the tumor had obliterated his dew claw. And was located where the dew claw once resided, Well anyway, this new vet I am seeing wants to remove Teddy's axiliary lymph node and biopsy it, if it is clean, he indicated I have two choices, amputation at the scapula, which to me seems radical, or radiation therapy at $5000.00. Any advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
Kindest Regards,
Alan
Alan, Not sure when you left this message. My lab has just had dew claw amp w/+CA. I will be using alternative therapies to treat. Check out naturalrearing.com. Marina Zacharias has been extremely helpful in developing a protocol for Jackson. Might be helpful for Teddy as well. The decisions are so difficult. Additionally you can search out holistic vets in your area who might offer other options as well. www.altvetmed.com/ahvmadir.html Best, SLR
alan,
i am posting on here as a comment, i hope that you come back and read this, since i tried to search "asy0uw1sh" on blogger.com and it said that you didn't have a blog!
i just got your message...i'm sorry that it took me so long to respond. even though i'm a vet tech, i know how difficult it is to deal with this sort of situation and having gone through it myself i know that it is tough.
my situation started when travis, my then 13 year old scottish terrier, started developing a "bubble" near his right front dewclaw...the dvm treated him with clavamox b/c we thought it was a nail bed infection (which squamous cell carcinomas can mimic, especially in scotties) b/c it was oozing pus, etc...and that did not help at all. it was starting to get quite large, so i opted for dewclaw amputation. he took forever to heal since the wound had to granulate in most of the way b/c the dvm didn't have a lot of tissue to work with since the carcinoma was so large. so the histopath came back and i was crushed...i had a sinking suspicion all along that it was a squamous cell...so then after he healed and 6 months later, he started developing a similar lesion on his p2 nail on his right front foot (the same one that the dewclaw was taken from). i made the decision right away to amputate the toe, and he did well. we also took chest and abdomal rads to see if anything had spread, and they came back clean. we also sent this toe to histopath and it also came back as a squamous cell carcinoma. he healed very well from that surgery too, but then about a few months later his right front paw and leg started to get a bit swollen...the dvm said that the only other option would be to amputate the whole leg, which i didn't want to do since he was 14 by then. so i gave him methacarbamol (robaxin), deramaxx and tramadol and he was comfortable and did not seem uncomfortable at all. a few months later, he turned 15, and the reason why i decided to put him to sleep at the time was because i woke up one morning to travis trying to drag himself across the kitchen floor. he could no longer use his back legs (he had some arthritis in his hips and stifles). i took this as a sign that it was his time. he looked so miserable...and this was the type of dog that would rather be dead than not be able to go on his twice daily walks...so i took him into the clinic where i worked and we put him down :(...it was the most horrible thing that i have ever been though, and it was been 2 years this month since i put him to sleep.
my advice to you would be to do the lymph node biopsy and consider the amputation. his age is something to consider though. i decided like i said that 14 was too old for my dog to have his leg amputated, but i have seen dogs that are 10 and 11 years old do very well afterwards. the vets that i work with amputate at the scapula too, it really is the better way to go. in order for him to have the best chance of beating this amputation would be the way to go. i don't have any experience with radiation therapy, since it is only done at a small handful of specialty hospitals, but with anything like that it will just put the cancer into remission, as will chemotherapy, and it is super expensive for an uncertain result.
i hope that i helped you, and again i'm so sorry that it took me so long to respond...best of luck to you and teddy! let me know what you decide and what happens with him.
-catherine :)
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