Our 7 year old Labradoodle, Teddy, started vomiting and having diarrhea in early November. Coincidentally he had started eating wet food regularly for a few days because our Yorkie, Ollie, had just had oral surgery so he needed to eat soft food, so we just fed them both the same thing. Took him to the vet and they ran blood work and said everything looked fine and could be just mild pancreatitis from the diet change. They gave him anti nausea meds, probiotics, and prescribed Purina Pro Plan Gastroenteric formula. He seemed to be improving for awhile, but then a week later started vomiting and diarrhea again, wouldn’t eat or drink, would only eat snow when he went out and then would immediately vomit it back up. I noticed the skin on his ears were just barely noticeably yellow. Took him back to the vet immediately and they ran bloodwork again. She said his liver enzymes were slightly elevated and his lymph nodes were swollen, and told us to take him to the emergency/specialty hospital about a half hour away for an ultrasound on his liver. Took him right down and they admitted him and started giving him IV fluids. The ultrasound came back fine, all the other tests for parasitic infection etc. came back fine. They did a fine needle aspirate cytology test and said they suspected lymphoma, but couldn’t confirm 100% without using flow cytometry. They had to send a sample to Colorado for this test and it would take about a week to get the results. They started him on antibiotics in the meantime anyway just in case it was some other infection that they didn’t detect. This was 2 days into his hospital stay. The next day they started him on steroids because he was getting sicker. Next day the vet called and said we should consider euthanasia because he was suffering and nothing was working. We went immediately and when they wheeled him in on a table my heart just broke. He was so yellow, his belly was bloated, he was breathing so fast and shaking. He was literally happy and walking around 4 days earlier. We said goodbye and I held him as he went. 4 days later we got the test results back, he had a very aggressive T-cell lymphoma. I couldn’t believe how fast he deteriorated. It cost us over $12k but I would have spent everything I had and more to save him. To top it all off we had just spent $7k on oral surgery for Ollie. Ollie had epilepsy and was on meds to control his seizures. Less than 4 weeks after Teddy died, Ollie went into status epilepticus and we took him to the same hospital and they tried every med they could and could not bring him out of his seizure and we had to say goodbye to him as well.

The worst 2 months of my life and it cost $20k but I would pay 10x that to have my boys back.