Every year as the weather in Atlanta warms up we tend to have our cocker spaniels shaved down. This year was no exception so while we were away on vacation in April we had Sunny groomed. Once he was shaved down we noticed a lump on the top of his back left foot. At first, based on how it felt we thought that maybe it was just something that needed to be aspirated by our vet. Unfortunately, this was not that case and once we realized it was a mass of tissue we had a punch biopsy done to determine what it was. Early last week we learned it was a sarcoma (soft tissue cancer). The upside is that while sarcomas are very locally aggressive (they spread into the fatty tissue, muscle and even bone) they have a very low risk of spreading through the body via the blood stream (10-20%).
Last Friday I took Sunny to met with a radiation oncologist and surgeon at the specialty vet in Atlanta to talk about our options moving forward. They did several chest x-rays and an ultrasound of his liver in addition to some basic blood work. Since those are the two organs that your blood flows through, if the cancer had spread this is where you would see it. Thankfully both came back negative for cancer and everything looked normal. The lymph node closest to his foot with the growth was slightly enlarged, but it is likely that the cause is in response to the biopsy. Either way they did take a sample and we should have the report back Monday. The oncologist seemed pretty confident that it would come back negative, but he wanted to be certain since a positive outcome would change how we need to treat Sunny.
All of these things taken into consideration left us with two treatment options. Generally, in this situation surgery with clean margins is enough. However, due to the location, it is unlikely that they can get the margins they would need so we would have to follow surgery up with 4 weeks of daily radiation. Going this route would have left us with pretty good odds (80% of dogs are cancer free at 3 years, 75% at 5 years), but there is a possibility the cancer could come back. Our second option is to amputate the leg. Given that the cancer has not spread they would consider this a cure and we would not have to worry about regrowth. We also learned that dogs tend to adapt better to loosing a back leg than a front leg since they put less weight on them.
Over the past few days we have done our own research and I have consulted with several of my vet and animal colleagues. Given that Sunny’s overall health is considered excellent and he has had no previous medical issues we have decided to amputate in the hopes of giving him the best possible outcome. We also factored in the fact that Sunny is not the biggest fan of the vet. While he tends to do ok once there, his overall personality is that of a shy dog and we were concerned about the stress caused by daily visits to the vet following surgery. I wouldn’t say it was an easy decision, but talking to others helped us determine that this was the best decision for Sunny and Sunny’s long term health.
Sunny
