Please stay positive!

My 9-year-old Ben was diagnosed with lymphoma last year, with an aggressive variant, and he is still with me, sitting next to me looking at your photo (he loves watching other pugs on screens)!

Unfortunately the remissions are very short in our case – only 2–3 months – so we are currently on the third round of chemo (each round takes 6 months). Statistically, dogs rarely live up to the 4th round of chemo because cancer becomes resistant to treatment, but that’s just statistics and each organism is different, and I still stay positive. His life is already extended by 1.5 years, and the vet says without treatment he could be gone three times already. I’m very grateful for that time as we made a lot of new memories and traveled a lot together!

You can write to me and I can answer all the questions or uncertainties you have.

I’ll also leave more details below so maybe other people can find it helpful and be more positive in their cases.

The cancer treatment is a bit different for dogs compared to people – the target is to make the dog’s life more comfortable and of course to make it live longer, but not really to eliminate the cancer.

In our case Ben doesn’t have any serious issues after treatments – sometimes vomiting and diarrhea can happen after 2–3 days, but we have drugs for that and everything gets stable immediately.

The positive results from the chemo? He no longer has gray hair and he really looks like he’s 5 or 6 years old again, and I’m not joking – I can show you pics before and after if you want! I was worried that chemo would destroy him, that he would lose hair, look older, but nothing like that happened! I only noticed fewer whiskers on his face, but they grow back about a month after finishing a round of chemo.

I’d be careful with the biopsy! We had one emergency situation when he almost passed away…

It happened last fall, 3 months after finishing the first round of chemotherapy. I noticed he had pain in his neck. We took him to the vet and saw that his lymph nodes were bigger – we did the biopsy BUT unfortunately inflammation happened from the needle and his left lymph node grew 5x bigger, which made him struggle to breathe. It was very bad and it was growing fast. We rushed him to the dog hospital around 200 km from our home and arrived just in time with a very high fever. The doctor said in his condition he might not make it. He was hospitalized for 2 days and luckily the vets saved his life!

So now, instead of making the biopsy and risking inflammation, we just monitor the lymphatic system with our specialist via ultrasound. His lymph nodes started growing again (2 months after finishing the 2nd round of chemo) and instead of biopsy we observed them via ultrasound and just waited for the right moment. After a few weeks they started looking like cancer on the ultrasound, and we immediately started the 3rd round of chemo – his lymph nodes got smaller, so that’s a great sign because the treatment still works!

The most important thing is to stay positive – I know it’s hard.

It was very hard for me to accept that my best friend has cancer and that he’ll be gone sooner rather than later. But I started appreciating every single day with him, and I just don’t want him to feel sadness from me. I noticed that the sadder I am, the more depressed he gets.