Pre treatment, Day 0

In order to start cyberknife there is an intense day of pre planning the week before where they do a ct scan, MRI, implanting of gold seeds in the roof of your dog's mouth that will help guide the laser to the exact location of the tumor, and an ultrasound (to rule out cancer in other areas of the body- if cancer has spread its unlikely you'll be proceeding with radiation). It all requires anesthesia so on Jake's pre planning day he was under for quite a while and did not feel very good when he got home (see above). He wanted to lay flat and not get up.

We hadn't thought this would be a big treatment day so we didn't schedule time off work to stay with him and we at the last minute had to make an unscheduled visit to our regular vet to get iv fluids and medicine. With this type of tumor (and having anesthesia) the brain swells and in his case he became disoriented and needed a diuretic medicine to take the swelling down. 1 ER visit to the vet and he again rebounded and was good as new. He's got a lot of fight in him yet!!

His leaning is still bad and we have to counterweight him by pulling on his harness (in the opposite direction of his body lean) when goes to the bathroom so he doesn't fall over. He still doesn't bark quite right. Forgot to mention but this was one of the early signs we noticed before we knew it was a brain tumor. When he barks he sounds like a dog that has been debarked for some reason. He also stumbles around the house - in fact the internet refers to this as 'drunk walking'. We've had to make the whole house disability accessible for now because he trips over everything and needs the perimeter of the house clear of furniture and objects- to balance himself he leans his left side on the walls.  There are now rugs everywhere so he doesn't have to struggle trying to walk on slippery tile or hardwood- which is usually 95% of our house. But for a dog with a brain tumor this is all relatively good- he's doing well; eating, drinking a lot (still on steroids so they eat, drink and pee a lot!).

We got our clearance to start our radiation treatments starting next week!!