Monday, December 22, 2008

Too Much Starch

I think someone put just a tad too much starch in my collar!
How's a girl suppose to get her beauty sleep with this thing on.


How many times do I have to tell you, I am NOT a satellite dish!

I guess I should explain the reasoning behind the collar. It's like this, when I got to my new foster home in OCTOBER 2008, they found a lump on my thigh and toe. The vet determined that the toe was nothing more than a foreign object in it and soaking it would help.

The thigh lump was another issue and not such an easy fix. It was determined that I had cancer and surgery was the only way to go. The mast-cell tumor on the thigh was removed. The stitches kept breaking open, so healing has taken a long time. To keep from pulling at the stitches, I had to wear the big collar. I also had to stay at the vet for weeks for monitoring 'cuz I kept pulling at the stitches, but also to receive post surgical treatment. The vet, Dr. Meier, did a fantastic and used a new procedure to remove the tumor. I don't understand it all, but I can tell you it was little painful. But knowing the alternative, well it was well worth it. This is a brief explanation of what was done by Dr. Meier.

She started using this treatment when she had a boxer with a big mast-cell tumor, and she contacted the U of Iowa vets for advice (or is it Iowa State that has the vet school?). Anyway, the vet she had contacted at the vet school had been using this experimental treatment pretty successfully, so she tried it. She's been using it on mast cell tumors since - all successfully.

What she does is she leaves the wound open, if possible, and 1-2x /week, she irrigates the wound with sterile water. The way it works is this: plain deionized water has nothing dissolved in it. Cells have lots of stuff dissolved in them. When you bathe a cell in plain water, there is a tendency for the water to pass through the cell membrane, due to the differences in osmotic pressure (due to the differences in dissolved solids). This is just plain diffusion of the water. As the water keeps passing into the cell, the cell will swell up, and eventually burst. So the cancerous cells die. The only side effect is that it is a little painful. She'd like to keep the treatment going for about a month.

Prognosis is very good. In her experience with this treatment, there is rarely a re-occurrence. She says that if it does re-occur, she would go back in and once again try to get it all, and repeat the water treatment. She says that there is no need for a skin graft - it's starting to heal, and close up from the inside. If it closes up, she can continue the treatment by injections, which she has done on other dogs, and on a cat. She described a cat that had two types of tumors on it's face. Removal would have been horribly disfiguring. She treated by injecting into the tumors, and it seems to have worked, even on the one that was not a mast cell tumor (she thought it might not work on that one).

She thinks that she can recover, and become some ones beloved pet. They just have to be sure to monitor her for a recurrence.

So that's the story behind the stiff collar. I think I might of liked the idea of being a satellite dish better!

I know that this was a lot to take in and if you have any questions, Illinois Birddog Rescue can answer them all for you. So PLEASE don't let this scare you. I'm better, healthy, and can't wait to play at my forever home.

Woof,
Sara Lee

1 comments:

Trade and economic issues said...

Wish you a
wonderfull Christmas(PEACE & HAPINESS). http://cynthiabs.blogspot.com/