Luke’s latest update on Murphy, posted Thursday, December 23
From our 1pm meeting today…
The team at Colorado State University is confident that Murphy will show signs of tumor regression by the two week mark before they consider pursuing some of my whacky ideas like implanting a stent or shunt to alleviate his breathing difficulties.
I said something like, “Okay, but he sleeps for 30 seconds then awakens with an unforgiving version of apnea. It’s even effecting his eating.”
“He’s just going to have to learn how to adjust”, was the counterpoint and a good one at that. I had just posted the question last nite about how I could teach Murphy to breath through his mouth not his snout. But big dogs are inherently stubborn SOBs (sumbitches as we say in TX) so we’ll see how that works out.
I agreed to wait to implant a device contingent upon Murphy’s comfortability and that his clinical symptoms don’t worsen. But honestly it feels like a crapshoot like those commercials you see, ‘Give me a week and we’ll take off the weight.’ Bet it didn’t work for those guys.
Don’t get me wrong I have complete respect for and trust in our oncology team but I’m a contrarian and questioning everything is the responsibility you have when making decisions on behalf of a loved one who can’t speak for themselves.
So once again, we wait but we do so with benchmarks. I’ll meet with the radiologist Dr. Custis again next week for a clinical evaluation and then the following week to discuss chemotherapy.
There has been a plot twist though – we got back the results from the biopsy for the two new tumors and from way outta left field, they’re sarcomas not adenocarcinoma. Why? No one seems to know but they’re malignant cells and anything beyond that seems to have no therapeutic value. Roughly translated, it doesn’t matter what color they are – red, green, or purple they must die.
“You got two weeks”
Luke has posted a video of Murphy.
