Jake is now 6 days post cyberknife. I see he's been reporting how he feels himself but I want to weigh in on how he's doing too. We're starting to be concerned that the tumor is still active. He's able to walk straight but is still leaning to the left and voraciously hungry- which could be the tumor or the steroids. He is also moaning every time he lays down as if to say "ugh.....i am so sick of this and just want to get comfortable and can't". I'm not sure if it's because he's in pain.
Also at times his limbs (especially the front left paw) gets stiff and crooked and he can't seem to straighten it out. We massage him and it seems to help but this was happening just before radiation when he was at his worse so we're not happy to see this happening again. Strangely this only seems to happen when he's very tired at the beginning or end of the day.
His personality is still not quite the same as before. He wants to be off by himself laying in the hallway alone a lot. I don't know if he's tired, in pain, etc. This might not seem like a big thing but his personality before was that he was literally involved in every single conversation and activities we did in the house. He was never one of those dogs who just sat by himself. He was always the center of the house. It's weird to say but even though he's here we still miss him.
HI JakesMom,
ReplyDeleteMax just wanted to sleep and sleep and sleep starting about a week after his CK... according to most of the people I found who had had CK - that was also what they wanted to do so we just left Max to sleep. Is Jake on anti-seizure meds? The prednisone may be making him really hungry... The other thing that might be worth mentioning is that when tumors start to die and cells start to die, they expand before they get smaller.. I definitely saw signs I didn't like for the first couple of months. What I 've noticed wit Max and I wish I actually wrote down how he was every single day to track it .. but I found him start to cycle where he's be great for about a week and a half and then I'd start to see some signs that worried me, then they'd go away for about a week and a half and come back again. Some weeks it was minor stuff, some weeks more major stuff. Sometimes he was just slower than normal or had less energy, and some times it was a droopy eye, or his ear drooping, or his vision was worse than it had been or his hearing was worse than it had been... I think it all depends on where the tumors are and what they are affecting. I'm not a neurologist, but these were my observations with Max. I did talk with the neurologist who did the CK about this. It would be interesting if you could track what goes on day by day and how he's feeling and maybe we can compare to what Max went through. It could be something else - but I remember starting to worry about Max a week or two after CK... and just let him sleep. We did also have to play around with his anti-seizure meds - the original ones were making him really sick to his stomach. We switched him over to Kepra and had to try different doses and he also was put on pepcid too. Hopefully something in this message is helpful.