It's Thursday night and I ate too many potato chips when I got home from the animal hospital. Still fighting a little of that self-indulgent stress eating thing.
We've left Sammy at the hospital overnight and he'll be having surgery in the morning.
The ultrasound didn't show any additional tumors, which is good although still inconclusive as any malignancy may just not be big enough yet to show up on an ultrasound. However, it did indicate that his splenic tumor has already bled twice. A third time would most likely be fatal (and, I imagine, given the progression, would happen within a couple of weeks). So we had some decisions to make.
Option 1: Have surgery and have them remove the spleen and biopsy the tumor to find out if its benign or malignant. If it's benign, great. We've solved the problem. If it's malignant, there's nothing to be done and he'd probably have about two months (four on the outside).
Option 2: Don't have surgery, assuming it's more likely malignant, and just bide our time until it either bleeds out again or metastasizes.
We had them do a chest X-ray just to see if there was any obvious malignancy that wasn't covered by the ultrasound. Nope--everything was clear. His blood work is all great. So, we've opted for the surgery and we're praying the good news continues and he falls into the roughly 30% of cases in which its benign.
He'll likely have surgery in the morning, and they'll keep him there for a few days of recovery, so we probably won't see him again until Monday. They made sure a few times that they informed us of the risks of anesthesiology and I just kept thinking, "At this point, this whole thing is a risk and that one is the least of my worries."
We won't know the results of the biopsy for several days, so it's unlikely the surgery itself will give us a whole lot more information. I'll post another update tomorrow after we hear from the surgeon and I have any more to share.
Thank you to all the #twilters on Twitter and Instagram who are sending the Doofus your good wishes--it means a lot!