Bummer

Will recently noticed that Lucy had a couple of new lumps along the incision from her surgery in October to remove her Mast Cell Tumor.  So we went back to the U of M oncology dept on Thursday and sure enough, her cancer is back with a vengeance.  In October they got good margins when they removed the tumor, meaning they removed the whole tumor plus some tissue to help make sure they  got everything, but MCTs are tricky.  Mast cells are actually part of the immune system, but MCTs are mast cells gone bad.  Because they are part of the immune system, the tumors can spread to other parts of the body without being attached to the obvious tumors - the oncologist called them satellite tumors.  So anyway, Lucy has 6-7 more tumors on her hip and they are behaving very aggressively - meaning they are growing very fast.  The vets actually seemed a bit shocked at how aggressive the tumors are.  We don't know if the tumors have spread to her internal organs, but we aren't going to do the invasive testing to find out either.  Surgery is not an option as they barely had room on her hip to get the original tumor out, so after carefully considering all of our options for treatment we are going to use drugs to make her comfortable.   Basically Lucy is going on hospice care I guess. Lucy seems to be doing fine - she is very perky and in fact, driving us crazy with multiple trips outside, which we discovered was to eat the suet bits the birds have left on the ground.  She gets very animated as she does what I call the Suet Dance, which if it wasn't happening every 5 minutes, would be quite entertaining.  

This picture is one of my favorites - it is taken at the lake on a cliff we have on the property.  We were down at the bottom of the cliff and she had found her way up on top of it.  She didn't seem to care that that stick was getting her.  

Because we don't know if she has any internal tumors, we don't know how long she will live.  They recently lost a patient at the U that had some MCTs and had been on the same drug treatment for a year.  So who knows.