Irie’s illness began in such a harmless fashion that none of us would have ever guessed what it was going to turn into. It was early January of 2017, and Irie had begun sneezing and coughing a bit. I brought her into work with me to be examined and to send off blood work to look for signs of infection. Her doctor examined her, and other than the mild upper respiratory symptoms she was seemingly healthy. We started her on antibiotics in hopes of snuffing out an upper respiratory infection if that was the cause.
Fast forward ten days, Irie had finished the antibiotics and while she was no longer coughing, the excessive sneezing persisted. It had even worsened to the point that the sneezes caused her to have nosebleeds. We attempted a second course of antibiotics just in case she had an infection resistant to the first. There was no improvement.
Our next step was to send out more blood. We tried two different tests: one to check if she had a clotting disorder and another to see if there was a fungal infection causing her symptoms. Both tests came back negative. With no answers coming back to us, we decided to anesthetize Irie to do a nasal flush and take X-rays of her skull. Irie was by no means an easy anesthetic patient. My nerves were already on edge from worrying about her, and in true husky form, she made sure to be stubborn enough to not want to remain sedated. We finally managed to keep her under, and her doctor continued to flush her nasal passageways with sterile saline. The hope was that we would be able to dislodge a foreign body, like a long blade of grass, by doing so. Unfortunately, the only thing to come out was the saline and a little blood. We moved on to take the X-rays and found nothing but a slight asymmetry between her nasal passages.
At this point in time, she had begun to develop two small masses on the right side of her muzzle near her eye. I brought her in to have the masses aspirated, in hopes that some fluid could be pulled out and would indicate that it was just a cyst or abscess, but unfortunately, we weren’t that lucky. It was with that aspirate that gave us our diagnosis: nasal cancer.
This was not a cancer we often saw at our clinic, so we did a lot of research into it and found that our options were limited. Due to the location of the mass, removal was not an option. The most intense course of treatment would have been chemotherapy and radiation, which could not guarantee her more than an additional six months. I called and spoke to someone at MedVet, our local emergency and specialty vet, to get the details on what this would all entail. She would essentially be required to go in numerous times and would be anesthetized each time, which we already knew would be difficult as she doesn’t like to stay under and reacted poorly during recovery the last time. It also meant that a completely new staff would be taking over her care, which meant that I would not be able to the technician assisting in her treatment since our hospital did not offer those services. While Irie grew to be a very sweet dog, she was not immediately fond of strangers, and even with me assisting her procedures she still often had to be muzzled. Ultimately, we decided that this route would be far too stressful for her for such an uncertain outcome. We chose to provide her with palliative care. We started her on Piroxicam to help with any pain and inflammation as well as an herbal supplement, Yunnan Bai Yao, to help with the nosebleeds.
Once we had decided the treatment route we were taking with Irie, my boyfriend and I had a long discussion about warning signs and at what point we would need to reassess her quality of life. We laid it out then and there that we never wanted to let her get to a point that she was suffering. We always wanted to make sure she was having far more good days than bad ones. It was at this point that I decided I wanted to do a bucket list with her. I was completely heartbroken that my four year old princess had cancer and likely wouldn’t get to live as long as she should have, but I wanted to make sure that she didn’t miss out on an experience that a dog should have. I was going to make sure that whatever time she had left with us would be the best time of her life. I vowed to myself that I would make the most of every minute I had left with her.
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