Prologue: Part One

This story begins with a teeny, tiny little bump.  It seemed innocuous enough, a raised spot on Stella's chest the same color as the surrounding skin.  Had it not sat exactly in her cowlick's center whorl of fur, I am not sure we would have noticed it at all.  It could have been a bug bite, but it didn't go away.  It could have been a skin tag, but every so often, it seemed to get a little more angry looking before resuming its normally benign appearance. Stella never seemed to notice it at all.

We were not strangers at the vet (Jim liked to joke that we were single handedly building a new wing at Peak to Peak Animal Hospital).  Stella always seemed to have something cooking.  Yeast infections, staph infections on her belly, interdigital pododermatitis (that for years we mistakenly thought were grass seeds embedding in her webbing), giardia (we lived across the street from a reservoir), chronic soft poop, incontinence.  You name it, she picked it up somewhere along the way.

At 16 weeks, Stella fell off our back deck resulting in a spiral fracture in her right tibia below the growth plate.  Because she was growing at such a rapid clip, rather than doing surgery that could stunt the normal development of the leg, Stella's vet recommended we bring her in once a week for eight weeks to have a series of ever larger casts applied (we love you Dr. Newton!).  Stella proved to be a Master Cast Chewer, and managed to get herself out of every single cast those first couple of weeks, resulting in nearly daily vet visits, till it dawned on us to wrap the damned thing in duct tape.  Voila!

Life continued with our gorgeous yellow girl, every day a dog's adventure in our rural community in the mountains above Boulder, CO, and time passed.

When we moved to Atlanta in 2009,  I set up a meet and greet appointment at Stella's new vet hospital and we were told that persistent little bump was a sebaceous cyst.  No big deal.  Carry on.

Stella has never liked to be pet, stroked, or touched.  She is a go, go, go kind of girl.  Throw the ball!  Walk!  Let's go snowshoeing! Where is my stick? Can you throw the ball again?!? On the rare occasion when she would consent to a little snuggling (torture!),  I would feel the little bump and think, "Huh.  Still there." At four years old, she just seemed a little young for cancer and, I admit, I tend to defer to professional medical opinion.

In 2011, I spent the summer in Basalt, CO with Stella to focus on recuperating from injuries suffered in a car accident.  She swam in West Sopris Creek, ate horse pucky (really, the only time her poop was ever firm, yay for fiber!), hiked with her childhood puppy friends, and cooked her head in the sun while I did exhausting amounts of physical therapy and learned to relish the afternoon lie down.  She got a little thin, but I did, too, and I chocked it up to all her time outside and the leptospirosis scare she had had earlier in the summer.  She had a big bloom of staph that August, but I thought it was because of food changes we were forced to do when her hypoallergenic kibble suddenly became unavailable (by 2011, we understood that much of her skin issues were due to food allergies and by changing her protein source, we could keep all the infections at bay).  She seemed a little itchier than usual, but, again, I thought it was due to the new kibble.

From Colorado, we traveled to the Adirondacks to visit my sister Sheri for a few weeks.  20 acres of pasture to run through, streams to jump in, moles to sniff out, dead mice to rub against, balls to lose in the tall grass, long forest walks with her Auntie Sheri.  It was pure doggie paradise! Stella was still itchier than usual, but no fleas, no embedded ticks, and her vet thought she was perhaps displaying allergies to something in that new environment.

Before starting the 18 hour drive back to Atlanta, we popped into a local vet to have Stella's anal glands expressed (have you ever had your dog squirt its anal glads in you car? If you have no idea what I am talking about, consider yourself lucky.  Very, very lucky.).  Out of the blue, the vet said she felt a solid mass in one of Stella's anal glands and said, with grim, matter-of-fact finality, "Adenocarcinoma, I bet."

I immediately called my brother, a vet who practices in Southern California, and got the terrifying run down on Adenocarcinoma.  "She needs to be seen by your vet as soon as possible, Beth.  It's rare, really very rare, but it's invasive."  Then I called Jim and, as always, his calm demeanor soothed my ringing nerves. "We won't know anything for certain till we see Dr. Stacy.  There is no point in getting upset till we know for certain what's going on in there," he reassured me from the airport in Atlanta, where he was waiting for his flight to meet me in Westchester for the drive home.  

My third call was to our vet in Georgia to make an appointment to be seen when we rolled into town.  Then Stella and I got on I-87 and headed south.