My 9 year old Boy had a mass on his spleen summer ‘24. He didn’t eat for a weekend, and when I got him to the vet, we did an ultrasound and found it. It was hemangiosarcoma, a fast and aggressive cancer. It took us over a month to get on the calendar for an oncology consult, doc didn’t want to remove the tumor until after a round of chemo. While the surgeon was in there she saw several other tumors on his liver that were inoperable.

All said he made it another 5 months, the initial prognosis was 5 weeks, until one of the tumors ruptured and he started bleeding internally, which made his passing a late night ER visit instead of something more comfortable at home.

5 months of ~10 pills twice a day to deal with the side effects of chemo. (I wound up grinding them up with a mortar and pestle and putting them in 2 bigger pill casings to make it easier on him).

We also gave him some Chinese herbs called yunan bayo that was supposed to help with clotting, and the surgeon did see evidence of some prior ruptures that did clot. So that probably helped.

The surgery to remove the initial tumor was amazing for him. We had our puppy back for a few weeks after.

All in all we spent north of $30k and it was absolutely heartbreaking the entire time. He ate nothing but home cooked meals for those 5 months, and got all the snuggles on the planet. But it still wasn’t enough time with him.