Cancer Check Up

Raven and I saw Dr Ken yesterday for her first post-chemotherapy check up, one month on from her last treatment. Raven was pissed. She thought I was leaving her there. She was quite okay with the liver treats at the reception counter though. Ken was very pleased with her, he checked her over thoroughly feeling her nodes in her neck, in front of her shoulder blades (pre-scaps for those in the know) and behind her knee or the pre-popiteals? He looked down her throat and did a general full body check. All was good. He said he couldn't be happier with the way she was physically. Weighing in at 16.4kg she was still at her normal weight and he assured me that new hair/coat and whiskers were growing 'just on the inside' at the moment and so they will take a while to come back. She certainly does have a thinner coat and seems to still be losing it. He told me he was happy to see Raven as regularly as I wanted
him to but at this stage he felt that due to the fact that I was quite on the ball with keeping a check on her (read that as 'obsessively checking nodes every day') that it wouldn't be necessary to see her any more than once every three months or so. That made me a happy camper hearing all that, plus the fact that she has now moved up in the statistics game to possibly being one of those 20% of dogs who are doing really well at this stage after diagnosis and who never have to come back in for more chemo. Of course there's a big bunch of 80% of dogs who do drop out of remission too but as Ken said - someones' dog has got to make up that 20% :-)
He basicially recommended I carry on exactly the way we have been doing, keeping her balanced diet up, ensuring she does her agility and gets her exercise, and just being very hands on with keeping an eye on her. So that was very assuring to hear. He told me they'd done about 10 Bone Marrow Transplants since Raven had started chemo, that there was also a new protocol they used for dogs dropping out of remission involving double the dose of cyclophosphamide and of course bone marrow being reinserted, and that he was still frustrated by the prohibitive cost of it all and that I shouldn't get him started on the pet insurance debate as we'd be there all day. I got the impression that Pet Insurance and Oncology treatments didn't really see eye to eye.
So fingers crossed now - that Raven is one of those precious 20%. Although he did say if she didn't happen to be and she had to have a repeat course of chemotherapy that the effectiveness and remission times the second time around for a dog doing this well currently was virtually the same.
Anyway as Ken said, no point in worrying about what you can't control the best thing to do now is just to savour every moment that she is well and with us and being loved. That, I think, was the most important piece of advice I took from yesterday's appointment.
*I can't believe I used the phrase 'got to be' THREE times in my last post. I think it comes from teaching 12,13 and 14 year olds for too long.