My Puppy has Bone Cancer

It’s such an odd thing to consider. My puppy, my two-year-old German Shepard girl, has bone cancer. When Mufasa was diagnosed with lung cancer, I was in shock because he was only 8 years old. He was too young for cancer. But Buffy is only 2. I’m not in shock over it, because I simply can’t believe this is happening.

The prognosis isn’t good. Like bone cancer in humans, it’s a rapid, all-consuming cancer, and there’s only one treatment: remove the bone. So we can opt to have Buffy’s left hind leg removed and force her to live years on three legs. If she was a small dog, I’d consider it in a heartbeat. But Buffy is a very large dog. She loves to run and chase animals, and being on three legs would either make that impossible or really, really hard on her body as she attempted it.

But wait, that isn’t all she has.

She also has severe hip dysplasia in both hips, but of course it’s worse in the leg that doesn’t have cancer. And if that wasn’t enough, she also has severe arthritis in virtually every joint in her body. The vet said if she didn’t know how old Buffy was, she would have guessed from the X-rays that she was looking at a 12-16 year old dog.

So removing the leg really isn’t an option. Her other hind leg can’t support her full body weight for years. And the vet told us that even if we did remove the leg. the chance is really high that the cancer has already entered her blood (fast moving cancer, remember) and it will just pop up somewhere else.

In other words, there is really only one inevitable decision that lays before us: when do we decide enough is enough for Buffy.

You aren’t supposed to make these kinds of decisions for a dog this young. Not to mention, we just made this decision only a couple of months ago with our Boston Terrier. So now I have to put down a second dog in the same year? Yeah, I haven’t been able to process it at all.

So I’ve turned to making jokes about it. Last night while recording a podcast, I commented that my MacBook has cancer, which is something I’ve been saying for awhile now. As I explained why it had cancer, I suddenly said, “It has cancer. Like my dog.” Totally killed the mood. And then I couldn’t stop cracking jokes about it. I know I horrified my co-hosts. How could I joke about something so awful?

I’ll tell you how. Making jokes is the only thing I can control in this situation. I can’t do a damn thing for my dog. I can’t save her life. I can only ease her pain until it gets to be too much. Even if I had all the money in the world, I still wouldn’t take her leg because she’d be miserable and depressed the rest of her life. Why put her through that much pain for the cancer to just crop back up anyway?

And the jokes continue between me and my husband. It keeps things light in the midst of that dark and looming decision hovering over us, and most importantly, it suspends the realization that this is happening.

Any day now, we will be down to one dog. I can’t bear the thought of it. I can’t bear the thought of Toby possibly getting depressed over missing his littermate. I can’t bear the thought of never seeing that sweet girl try to slink away in an army-crawl when we punish her brother. I can’t bear the thought of her never using her long nose to force me pet her again. I. Just. Can’t.

Let me suspend belief as long as I can. Let me make jokes. The harsh reality will come crashing down soon enough.