Our primary question over the weekend was whether or not to start a chemo regime. We'd spoken to the neurologist who told us that she was thinking we should use hydroxyurea. So, naturally we spent a bunch of time reading up on it.
The bottom line, the drug has been around for 100 years, originally for diseases like sickle cell anemia. But, over the past 20 years they've had some success using it for meningioma's. Most of the limited research had been on human tumors. In fact, the research on dogs was limited to at most a couple dozen cases. And, as our primary care vet had pointed out, scientific research really requires control groups. Here, there was precious little in the way of definitive results, let alone any true indicators that the positive results (some results were mixed) were a result of the hydroxyurea.
We were leaning towards going through with the chemo. This despite the fact that the successes with it seemed so weakly aligned that you might as well have been praising olive oil or eating oranges. It was one of those, "the side effects are unlikely to be major (as opposed to human chemo) and it might extend Cassie's life"
But then Cassie came down with a bladder infection on Sunday...
It began Saturday night when she woke up at 4am and asked to go out to the bathroom. She's done that less than5 times in her entire life, so we knew something odd was going on. And then Sunday the deluge began.
It was a deluge of various sorts. First, it was one of the rainiest days we'd ever seen in LA -- some reports of 4" to 6" of rain falling, along with flooding measured in feet of water on roads. The rain never let up all day. And, through it Cassie kept asking to go out to the bathroom. Cassie, who typically would 'hold it it' rather than get rained on, went out literally 30 or 40 times. She'd squat on the lawn (we were watching from the doorway) for sometimes a minute, with the rain lashing at her, as she went.
Actually, as she tried to go. After about the 10th outdoor exercise I flipped her on her back when she'd come in and examined her. A spot or 2 of blood, where it wasn't supposed to be...
It was impossible to see if she was actually urinating blood, but we were now on a heightened wariness about her health. And naturally, we read up on the condition.
Seems like there were 2 possibilities, both tied to the prednisone (the steroid that was ostensibly shrinking the swelling around her brain tumor). Most likely she either had an infection because the steroid was reducing her defenses. Or, alternatively, she was bleeding because bladder bleeding was a sometime side effect of the prednisone.
[Everything is a side effect. In other words, you can find an internet reference for any drug and note that it causes any side effect you can name. Unfortunately, in this area, the internet isn't much use.]
This 'side effect' was a new factor to consider in our weekend of thinking about chemo treatment. Eventually, we came down on the side of not doing it. Since we weren't planning on any more MRI's, it seemed to be like this. If we give her the chemo, we might see side effects that we didn't want Cassie to suffer through. And in addition, we wouldn't know if it was doing any good. So, with some likelyhood of bad and no way to be confident that there was a good result from doing it, we were gradually concluding that we were going to go only with palliative care.
Of course, then the power went out at 5 pm and stayed off till 10pm. The rain didn't go away though. So, we sat in candle light, with Cassie on the sofa with us, talking this through one more time.
No comments:
Post a Comment