Niko got his staples out Wed !! Bad thing now is he won’t eat his food and now has a fever and is officially diagnosed with stage 3 hemangiosarcoma 😦 … Chemo starts Tuesday the 30th. I’m so grateful for the doctors who are taking care of our baby thou. After 

Before

The big day was Thursday !! The past day and a half have been ruff. Niko started to not act like himself after me and Tom came back from the church carnival. He was just mush, no smiles, and wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t eat. Niko normally eats like there’s no food in the house. It wasn’t until Thursday morning at about 1:30am when he woke us up to pee which he never does, did he start acting like himself.

The morning of his surgery he was running around to go for a ride. He was happy. At 8:30am Tom, Tom’s mom and me were at Central Connecticut Veterinary Hospital. Dr Taylor went over everything for his surgery and we said our good byes. Tom went back to work. Me and Celeste stayed at the hospital. Especially after what happened with the first surgery, no one was making me move. Celeste had same thought in her head. Niko is our boy and we weren’t leaving. 

About 10:40, Dr. Taylor came out, the only thing going through our head was what happened now. Well our Niko wasn’t clotting like he was supposed. It was concerning to the doctors. On the extreme end it would have meant Niko wouldn’t survive the surgery. They decided to defrost the plasma and he would need a transfusion. His surgery would be further delayed another 2.5 hours. 

All we could do was wait, the longest wait ever. It was 2:40 pm when we were told Niko would go in for his surgery. 

Then it was more waiting. They told us it would be two hours. It was past 5pm when we were told he was out of surgery and safe. This was the second worst day in Celeste’s life. The first being when Tom decided to crack his head open playing gladiator in a trash can. 

We got brought into the back room to see Dr. Taylor. When Dr Taylor came in she explained, how every second Thursday a board certified anesthesiologist is at North Haven. Our little boy was having his surgery the day she was there. She said Niko was amazing and did very well. They did end up removing 5 ribs. They had to remove part of his diaphragm because the tumor was attached to it. They were able to use some of his lower skin to close up his chest wall bc part of his chest wall had to be removed. They gave him blood during surgery because he was losing a bit more blood then they had hoped. After all those fears of him bleeding out, he made it. I asked dr. Taylor if he was breathing on his own. She said they took him off the ventilator before the surgery was over and he was breathing on his own. That’s my little boy!! 

We asked Dr. Taylor if we could see him. He was out cold. It wasn’t an easy site to see him completely out. His eyes all glassed over and his tongue hanging out. He was alive and he made it through the surgery, that’s all that mattered in that moment. 

We won’t have him home until Saturday at the earliest and Sunday at the latest. He’ll be at the hospital for the next 48 hours to make sure he does well and there’s no issue.

One of the worst 12 hours of all our lives just waiting at the hospital. I can’t wait to have him home. No large dog will be allowed near him bc he won’t have his ribs to protect his lungs. But he’s alive and he made it through and that’s the most important thing in the world. His primary tumor was removed. 

Best damn new in the world came Friday August 12.. Niko was up walking and peeing .. He didn’t do this after the first surgery :)) BIG VICTORY !! 

     We got the results back from Niko CT and his FNA/ultrasound of his spleen yesterday. Good news is his spleen is okay. He has lymphoid hyperplasia in his spleen which means we won’t have to remove his spleen. Bad new he’s got mets to his lungs. It didn’t show up on his x-Ray or ultrasound but his CT showed multiple small lesions in his lung the largest being 7mm. This means his cancer is spreading. The ribs around the affected rib (11th) are not affected so we’re going surgery can get rid of the primary tumor and we hope to get the small lesions with chemo if it’s possible.        

We’re taking every precaution possible to stop the tumor from growing. This includes no carbs and no sugar in his diet. NO WHEAT, NO GRAIN, CORN, and anything that we don’t know on the back of the label. Me and Tom don’t smoke but with the cancer now heading towards his lung we are not allowing smokers near Niko. We have nothing against smokers and their choice to smoke but our baby comes first. Smoking stays on clothes and everyone knows our pets lick themselves. They ingest those chemicals that people leave on sofas and beds, and floors. We just want to do everything to keep our kid safe. 

     We are going in for surgery Thursday. I know some people aren’t dog people and may not consider their pets important enough to spend money on them.  But NIKO IS FAMILY !! 

*licking machine*

When life gives you a bad hand you learn to take the lemons and make lemonade. Or in my case pasta sauce, because Tom says lemons are over priced. 
Anyway so happy to say Niko got to do his first run up and down the beach since we found out he had cancer. We’ve guarded him so much because we keep getting told he would internally bleed out but Niko happiest when he gets to play. 

Wish I had a video !! 

After so much stress and sleepless nights, mommy and daddy got to spend some alone time for the first time in weeks. Big shot out to grandma and grandpa for watching Niko, so we could escape from the world for a bit. 

Happy hour at the Mooring ! 

**Surgery scheduled for thurs August 11th**

The day of my Radiation Therapy Boards June 25, 2016, we found a lump on Niko bigger then a golf ball on his rib. This is probably why I remember the date so well. We scheduled a vet visit for that Tuesday. The vet did a fine needle aspiration (3X) to try to determine what it was. We got a phone call from the vet two days later saying she wasn’t sure what it was. We didn’t want to put Niko who is 9 years old through any unnecessary surgery if we didn’t have to so we got a second opinion at another vet. We got allot more information from that vet and we found out that it was most likely cancer. It seemed like the tumor was in that one little area and it wouldn’t be a bad surgery. So we scheduled the surgery for July 14, 2016.

That fateful day came up and we dropped Niko at the Vet at 8:30am and we were told he would out of surgery around noon and to wait for a call. Noon came and it wasn’t the call we were waiting for. Tom left work at the moment and came home. We were told the tumor was the largest tumor the vet had ever seen and it was so deep she couldn’t even get it out. The tumor had caused a blood clot and she was afraid he would bleed out. We had two options put him down and she would keep him alive until we got to the hospital or close him up and see if he makes it through the night. It was the worst day of our life. How does someone make the right decision in that case. We choose to bring him home. He wasn’t going down this way.

That was the start of some of the hardest nights we would have. We took our mattresses and placed them into the living room so he wouldn’t have to jump onto the bed. We checked his gums through the night and hope that there was no internal bleeding. Worst thing that broke our hearts was he wasn’t his normal happy Niko self. He so out of it, he was so confused and it broke all of our hearts. He had 40 staples in his side and a fluid sac they couldn’t drain because it was too dangerous with the chance of bleeding.

We took him to the Vet the day after to get him checked up on. The happiest moment was him dragging me around the entire front yard at the vet trying to runaway from the office. He was getting back to normal. He shocked the vet techs who never saw a dog with that much energy after almost not making it out of surgery the day before. But that’s a Denison for you, proving them all wrong. The vet told us it was most likely the worst cancer possible, Hemangiosarcoma. She said he would have a few weeks to a couple of months. We were given the name of a specialist who we called that day for an appointment.

For anyone who has every met me knows I will find answers and I snoop. So I went on a research spear to find dogs that survived this cancer. The one thing I found in common of all the dogs who survived was their diet. So, we started changing Niko’s diet to something that was more natural to canines.

We saw the vet oncologist on the 27th of July, and she laid out a plan to see if Niko’s tumor was able to be removed. His X-ray and ultra sound was scheduled for the next day. We got his 40 staples removed the 28th of July before heading to his next appointment. Cutest moment that day was him sitting on my lap while the vet removed his staples. If anyone has met Niko, he isn’t a small boy, 81lbs to be exact. It made for a cute scene.

After his next ultrasound and x-ray at North Haven, we waited for the call to come from the vet. When we got the call, it gave us some hope. The diagnostic scans showed that his 11th rib had deteriorated, which meant the tumor could have started from the bone and not from his tissue. It didn’t rule out that it wasn’t a hemangiosarcoma but it gave us hope that it could be a osteosarcoma or chondrosarcoma. It’s the difference between having a couple of months at the most to years with him.

A Denison never goes down without a fight. As his parents we’ll go down fighting. We’ll eat roman noodles for life if we have to. #NIKODenison

Next step is his surgery consult on August 3.

Living Room Sleepovers.. our loving baby boy