Murphy had emergency surgery for a tumor that burst and that office recommended I start chemo right away. (So did Dr. Damian Dressler’s book). So I did chemo “first”. In the meantime I did research into holistic vets, etc.
The Oncologist did a test to see what kind of lymphoma Murphy had.
Dr Cronin felt MOPP and CHOP were the same for the type of lymphoma Murphy has. MOPP is every 3 weeks and CHOP was every week.
I also learned since you don’t know how your dog is going to respond to chemo, they really can’t tell you what will “work” or how it will go.
Prednisone. Very common drug. It makes your dog pant at night as they are getting used to it. They also can “wet” the bed. But apparently can help slow cancer. Most vets want to give it right away. All the holistic people hate it. Murphy is on it and so far, so good. Only problem we had was Murphy wakes himself up after “wetting the bed” so I put down puppy pads on the bed. Only happened a couple of times.
I found Murphy’s schedule for poops/pees changed. He can't go more than 2-3 hours without needing to go out. Murphy is bell trained. And he needed to go out more often. He often will not “tell me” he needs to go out, but then he pees for a full minute when he’s out!
Murphy’s first chemo treatment I told the vet I didn’t want him to feel any pain or puke, etc. I felt if my husband saw him suffer, he wouldn’t want to keep trying chemo. We overshot, and Murphy was a zombie. He wasn’t in any pain, but he wasn’t himself. The next chemo treatment, we didn’t do any of the post chemo drugs and he threw up everywhere. We ended up doing outpatient chemo support.
3rd time's a charm, at that point I had received a second opinion and the vet recommended just doing 1 of the meds we had done the first time. This is where keeping a journal helped because once we were past day 4, I knew we were in the “clear”
12/8/2020: Murphy’s scans came back “clear”. Dr Kim Cronin did an ultrasound and found no nodes, no masses, no tumors.
12/15: 4th round. Day 6 just passed. I’ve added Metronidazole to Murphy’s post chemo care and that seems to have done the trick for the last 2 chemo treatments.
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