Summer is flying by and I have been very behind with the Romeo updates, so here is an attempt to catch up.
In May Romeo finished his chemo at OSU. He even got a nifty certificate to celebrate the occasion.
Once his five rounds of chemo were done, his next check up was a month later for another chest xray to check for metastases in his lungs. At this appointment in late June, a small tumor was found in Romeo’s lung. Only the size of a pea in Great Dane sized lungs, Romeo wasn’t feeling the effects of the tumor yet, but this did mean that the first round of chemo didn’t succeed in stopping the cancer.
Here is an unconcerned Romeo frolicking just after his tumor was found.
Since his first round of chemo didn’t work, the doctors at OSU talked with us about other treatment options. Next we started a four week course of palladia – a cancer drug that inhibits growth of blood vessels to tumors, hopefully slowing tumor growth. The nice things about palladia is that is is given as a pill three days a week, so Romeo didn’t need trips into Corvallis for treatment. At the end of the four weeks Romeo would have another set of chest xrays to see how the tumor was doing.
The only drama Romeo had while taking palladia was some vomiting and diarrhea at the very end of the treatment. Eventually Romeo vomited up a six inch roundworm (how embarrassing!!), which probably had more to do with the stomach issues than the drugs did.
On July 25th, at his post-palladia check up, Romeo’s xrays showed that in the month since his last xray, his tumor had grown to the size of an apricot, which meant that palladia hadn’t worked either.
If the tumor keeps going at its current rate, Romeo has one to two months left before it won’t be possible to have a decent quality of life. There are a couple of other treatment options that may or may not actually help. Since it seemed like Romeo’s energy level had already begun to decline and he hadn’t responded to the other medications, we decided to stop treatments.
Over the last two weeks, our big puppy has slowed down and is even more mellow. He tires easily and his outings to the backyard are shorter and shorter. But he’s still happy and enjoys “helping” fill the water bowl with the hose and is currently begging quite persistently for dinner.
So for now we’re enjoying our time with our big puppy.
