Fur baby

Just thought I’d let you know before you read on that this is a sad post.

I can’t remember if I’ve spoken about our fur baby before. She’s a beautiful doglet who has been part of our family for about 7 years. We rescued her from The Dog’s Trust, in Wales, after she’d spent 1 year and a half in their kennels.

She’s our first baby as we say and she was our first pet (we now also have a turtle and three Tokay geckos). She has helped our little family more than we’ve helped her and inspired Matt to study veterinary science.

However, recently she had been lame and so we were giving her metacam (a pain reliever) and she appeared to be getting better but during lockdown it seemed to get worse. We suspected a dislocated shoulder, and I was recovering from being unwell so Matt drove off to our veterinary practice to get it, hopefully, popped back in. It was the worst outcome and it turned out to be a suspected osteosarcoma (bone cancer) and what we thought was her shoulder popped out was actually a tumour.

Matt, being amazing through all of this, had her quickly transferred to our local veterinary hospital with the help of our fantastic vet family and within 4 days of her tumour being found, she had her leg amputated to remove the tumour. The leg was sent off for testing and the osteosarcoma was confirmed. She is starting chemotherapy to help slow any residual cancer cells.

Our girl has been amazing. A trooper as the vets and nurses who have looked after her so carefully have said. Considering, out of the blue, her whole leg has been removed she has sprung back within two weeks and her personality has come right back out! We can walk her, increasing the time by 5 minutes every week and I have to say it’s hard for us because she loves nothing more than hours of walking and running around in the fields. It’s still important that in her recovery she’s not too active and is just able to stretch her legs and get fresh air. We’re lucky in that she enjoys nothing more than a snuggle and dozes for hours on end so when she’s in the house she’s golden. When we’re out, we’re on 20 minutes and you can feel her pull for longer – she’ll even wait at crossroads to try and convince us to stay out!

I want to say thank you to everyone who has looked after her, cared for her during this time and everyone who has been so kind and reached out to us and asked us how she is doing.

I wanted to share her and our story because I wanted to share in case anyone has or is going through the same thing. I thought I might log the journey on here. I have stayed quiet on social media because some of our friends still don’t know as it’s hard to tell everyone. When we finally do, I’ll be sharing more photos so make sure to follow me on Instagram.

L xx