This journey wouldn’t be a journey without its share of ups and downs. We arrive at our new duty station and again start looking for housing. We were leaving a 3000+ square foot home with more space than we could possibly use and end up squeezing into a 1200 sq ft apartment.
Talk about a tight fit. It’s COVID and no one is going anywhere, we have an extreme amount of stuff in the apartment and its basically assholes and elbows all over the place with everyone living on top of one another.
My daughter is still enrolled in High School in Hawaii and attending classes online until she is enrolled locally. The best class is PE. Everyone is experimenting at this point and here she is doing a CrossFit style workout online in front of her computer. Her PE teacher is hardcore and requires everyone in front of their camera doing burpees, pushups or whatever she requires them to do. There’s nowhere to go, so she’s in the living room or the corner of the apartment doing this workout while we’re sitting here and laughing at her. Good times.
I’m still obsessing about Real Estate and insanely looking to buy a house. It’s competitive as hell we lose a house after 30+ offers and $100K over asking price. This is out of control. Everyone is stressed.
My wife is able to land a job and falls back into her career as a Microbiologist. Now she has to carve out a place to work in this tiny apartment, while our daughter is doing the online schooling thing. The dogs are restless, but they’re mastiffs and basically sleep 18 hours a day. They have about 5 minutes of running within them and before you know it, its over and they’re sleeping on the couch.
But one of the dogs is limping. He’s limping all the time and we don’t know why. He’s having a hard time getting up and down the stairs and we just attribute it to his age. But he hasn’t been running or doing anything, so what could the problem be?
We leave it alone and keep an eye on it to see if it’ll just resolve itself. Hell, I feel like this sometimes and it all just works itself out. Either that, or I just get used to the pain. After all, being in the Army gives me the body equivalent to a 75 year old in a 40 year old’s body. Its not the age, its the mileage.
A few weeks pass, and then a month. He’s restless and whining at night and can’t sleep. Something’s not right, so we take him to the vet.
Its cancer. Specifically the worst kind, but common for his breed – Osteosarcoma. Bone Cancer. Painful.
At this point, our boy is over 10 years old. This is old for an Italian Mastiff. What do we do? We argue about the treatment to give him. Do we amputate the limb, or is this too much for his age? How much time does he have? How far along is it and what are our other options?
Not easy discussions. We do imagery and it seems to be in between his ulna and radius. Its not as far along as we thought and there’s a possibility we could remove the ulna and isolate the tumor before it hit the other bone and spreads. It hasn’t spread to his lungs or anywhere else, so its still possible to remove. That seems reasonable, doesn’t involve amputating his limb and there’s still hope before just going to palliative care.
We go for the operation and it causes a rift between me and my wife. She’s against surgery and wants to keep him comfortable, but after looking at the situation and assessing that it wasn’t so far along and could possibly be removed – I want to fight it to the end.
After the operation, they inform me that they were able to remove the bulk of it, but were unable to isolate it. It had spread to the radius bone. I was pissed. It was time to look at palliative treatment and a cocktail of drugs to keep him comfortable.
We were living in the apartment and had to take him up and down the elevator to use the bathroom outside. He’s an old dog and was becoming incontinent. He was having a hard time walking, so we bought a special harness to help move him around. He’s a big boy, so it became either a 2 person lift, or me heaving him around to use the bathroom.
He needed someone around him each night to comfort him or take him out as needed. Eventually, he couldn’t sleep in bed with us so this meant sleeping alone downstairs with someone permanently on the couch with him. Not easy. Someone would end up biting the bullet more than anyone else. This meant little sleep and a lot of frustration all around.
It was painful to watch and it caused stress with everyone in the house. I was blamed for fighting the cancer and him suffering unnecessarily. This went on for a full year until it was finally time to put our boy to rest.
As I write this, there are still unresolved issues with the family about how we handled it. Sometimes I wonder whether I was the one who wanted to fight it more that my dog did. I wonder if that was the right decision based off the circumstances presented to me. I wonder if I pulled my feelings out of it enough to look at it objectively, weigh the risks and make the right decision knowing that in the end – we all lose to cancer regardless of what we do. He was awesome. We miss him. Fuck Cancer.