Hi Nina,
I hope Spencer is feeling better today..I have been trying to catch up on reading, but as usual, I'm behind..I did read this about the possibilty of Spencer having lymphoma..There really isn't too much expense to it to find out if it is lymphoma and you don't have to have sonograms or mri's. My internal med specialist did a special blood test that confirmed it on my City Kitty ( Inky's mom) and that was in 1997. The sonograms and exploratory surgery that my kitty had only would show where the masses were located and how large...She had the one in the middle of the intestines medistinal or something like that and it is inoperable. So she did chemo as I mentioned in my email to you. You can do sonograms to see if the chemo is working...I guess the real expense is...the treatments you do and continuing xrays and sonograms. My vet could tell by just feeling as it shrunk so I chose not to do sonograms as it would only stress her
and mainly the monthly blood work would tell us what was going on with most things..She was on 20mg pred daily the rest of her life..and she had almost a yr. We had to stop the chemo cause her blood counts were getting too low from the chemo and at that point you could do no more at the time.. Now with some other new meds on the market there may be a better chance of longer remissions with epogen and those types meds to help with the anemia. It was odd that when I found out that my kitty had lymphoma..my Mom had passed away 1 month prior to that and she had lymphoma...My kitty was treated with the same drugs that my Mom was going to get in Houston..Almost all the tests and things they did to my Mom in 96 and up until her passing in 97 were the same as my kitty was getting..So it was really a strange ordeal to live through.. Anyway, I just wanted to share my experience with you. Also, Buster had a very rapid form of it...lymphoblastic lymphoma if you
remember he got sick in Feb and passed on March 7. The lymph nodes in his neck swelled so much just over night that we never even had time to do anything for him. I had him to the vet on Fri and noticed the enlarged nodes on Sat. took him back so she aspirated it and sent it to Texas A and M vet school. We got the results on Tues and he passed just a few hours after that..so we had no time for anything..He was doing ok with no apparent signs until the last few days..That was so awful..
Let me know if I can be of any help,
Our prayers are with you guys,
Kerry, Bandy and Inky
Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail.
