Last Wednesday the Vet said my dog had maybe 24-48hrs, 3 days max to live without medication, with only 1 week to 3 weeks top life expectancy if I put her on the pharmaceutical drug Prednizone - Well, she made it 6 days, most of which were happy days with Pepper doing so great that we thought she had a chance to beat it! Welcome to our fight against cancer, naturally - sadly, you can't win ever battle...
Introduction
I just wanted to share my story of the fight against cancer in my 9 year old border collie Pepper, and wrote the majority of this post yesterday, intending to finish it up after we got back from our late afternoon vet appointment, but then things quickly took a turn for the worse and I didn't get around to posting it last night. I was hoping to post a series of posts documenting the ongoing battle, but unfortunately for us we got to the cancer too late to stand a chance, and yesterday evening Pepper's liver gave out and she passed away peacefully at home, quickly and painlessly with me by her side. So despite losing the battle, I'm thankful for about as good an end as I could have hoped for, and am grateful for the last 4 excellent days we had together past the vet's expectations, while Pepper was doing almost as good as ever playing fetch and going on walks like her normal self.
I still wanted to share our story but due to circumstances I wanted to add this introduction, and I plan to post a few follow up posts focusing more on the specific diet and natural medicines/supplements which have been successfully used to fight cancer in dogs and other knowledge I gleaned, as this post more just chronicles our story; and will surely post an RIP post in memory of Pepper and maybe give a proper conclusion to the story with more details. For now this intro will have to do. Our story is below, more posts to follow as I have time.
(Photo: That's my dog Pepper doing well on a short little sunset walk yesterday evening, 5 days after the dreaded prognosis last Wednesday when the vet thought she might not even have a full day left. So far so good for the most part, more details below...)
So if anyone is wondering why I haven't been posting much lately, I've been rather overwhelmed with life, in large part because my awesome 9 y/o border collie - Pepper - was just diagnosed with lymphoma just over two weeks ago on September 21, so that's been taking a lot of my time and energy lately. But now that I've got a minute, I just wanted to make a quick post and share our journey so far as well as all the new info I've learned regarding cancer in dogs and fighting cancer naturally, so here goes. I know a lot of people out there are hungry for information and success stories regarding fighting cancer naturally, and sadly there has been far more research on that with people than with dogs, so my hope is to be able to chronicle our fight as it goes on, share everything I've learned and what I'm doing, and hopefully against all odds we might just end up beating this thing or at least extend our life together beyond the traditional vet's expectations. I hope at the least other people going through the same fight or those who may be forced to in the future will be able to use the info to help fight this nasty epidemic of cancer in dogs.
What I discovered about cancer in dogs - main causes
Yes that's right, there is an epidemic of cancer in dogs, with 50% of adult dogs now being diagnosed with some form of cancer (mostly 10 years or older), a not so fun fact I wasn't aware of until I started researching fighting cancer in canines. I was reminded of this just the other night when I stumbled upon a Vlog of @abolitionistjay who's going through the same fight, different type of cancer, with his dog. I guess it's a little encouraging knowing I'm not alone and that many others are going through the same battle, but sad the earth is becoming so poisoned that fewer and fewer humans and animals are escaping this dreaded fate.
Here's another not so fun fact I learned, that three of the leading causes of cancer in dogs are chemicals (lawn fertilizers/insecticides/household cleaners/etc.), commercial dog food (particularly high-grain dry food), and vaccines. Toxic tap water (think flouride, chlorine, heavy metals, etc.), stress, genetics and other factors can play a part in creating an environment in which the cancer can develop and spread. Yes, vaccines, who would have thought? In fact once your dog is diagnosed with cancer one can actually get a vaccine exemption for their pet, as many states/counties/cities and even property management companies "require" by law or by lease that your pet is "up to date" on their vaccines, at least until they get cancer, despite research showing that aside from rabies, vaccinating adult dogs including giving them their "booster shots" is unnecessary and ineffective (see embedded links above).
But that's probably just a crazy conspiracy theory, because why else would most vets push this is a "requirement" for a healthy dog without telling you of the potential deadly side effects? Besides it's not like vaccines can kill humans or give your child autism, let alone cause cancer, as long as you listen to the reassurances of your traditional doctor that is, because they would never push a poison (mercury, etc.) on you in the name of keeping you healthy, right?
I was however assured by a clinical veterinary nutritionist yesterday that vaccines were likely not the cause of Pepper's cancer, as it is the toxic chemicals in the environment and second-hand smoke responsible for lymphoma. For those unfamiliar, lymphoma is cancer of the lymph-node system which attacks the immune system, so that's what I am dealing with. Now, with all the not so fun facts I felt obliged to share out of the way, on to our story...
Fighting the cancer - developing a battle plan
When you finally get that call from the vet and they say their fears were confirmed by the fluid sample test results that your dog tested positive for cancer, at least for me my whole world seemed to change in an instance. For me this day was Friday the 21st of September, and despite expecting the results for about 5 days, it is still a shock, especially when the dog's been your daily companion since puppy-hood for over 9 years.
They're nice and all at the pet hospital I've been using, and really care about the animals, but the accepted options by traditional vets are limited and don't give much hope for the long term. The main options I was given was either chemo which has very low success rates of eradicating the cancer in dogs and tends to depreciate their quality of life while only potentially lengthening it; or, at least with lymphoma, Prednizone which they say can extend the life expectancy by 3 months while increasing the quality of live, and which my vet recommended for my situation. Naturally I wanted to stage the cancer to see what we were looking at as far as a timeline but due to my financial limitations I quickly balked at the estimated $1600 just to find out the expected lifespan of my puppy and how far the cancer had spread. Three months sounded pathetic, as I wanted a chance to actually fight this, and this the best they can do? I remember asking myself this one question over and over and quickly decided I wanted to try fighting this thing as naturally as possible, just to give the pup a chance to actually fight this thing rather than delay it for a couple months. So I held off on the Prednizone for the time being and had already decided against chemotherapy before the diagnosis was even official. Thankfully the pet doctor was very supportive and empathetic towards my choice, not trying to push anything on me, for which I am very greatful.
And so began the online research, much of which is briefly summarized above, and the first thing I realized I needed to do to give Pepper a fighting chance was to radically change her diet and get her off grains entirely and lower her starch and carbs as much as possible, while boosting antioxidants. Coincidentally I had already switched her diet almost entirely from regular dry food to whatever cooked meat, fish, and eggs she would eat mixed with oatmeal or rice because she had fully stopped eating the week prior, hence the vet visit where they took samples of her lymph fluids fearing she had lymphoma.
This followed a month of antibiotics to fight an infection within her skin in her neck - cellulitus - which had created a large lump but which had tested negative for lymphoma (as the lump was so big it was blocking access to her lymph nodes so naturally the were unable to get a test sample from the lymph nodes themselves). So basically as soon as that initial infection was entirely gone, Pepper stopped eating. As soon as they saw her and heard she wasn't eating, cancer was all they thought it was, but still needed to confirm. Needless to say it's been a crazy little journey even before the diagnosis, and now they are pretty certain she already had the cancer before that very initial vet visit over 1.5 months ago, with her weakened immune system being the cause of the infection, so it took over a month just for them to diagnose the cancer, leaving us a month behind in starting our fight against it. But, I still have hope and we will keep fighting this to the end.
With that little back story of our current journey out of the way, back to Pepper's diet. So based on my research following the diagnosis I realized I needed to cut out the rice and oatmeal and replace it with high-antioxidant/high-vitamin fruits and veggies to decrease starch and carbs which feed the cancer, so that is exactly what I did. I cooked up a large batch of chicken mixed with some fish and a few eggs, blueberries, broccoli, carrots and a few other ingredients I'm probably forgetting and she seemed to love it! Eventually ran out of that, mixed up another larger batch with a few tweaks in the recipe and all seemed to be going well.
In the meantime I had met with a nutritionist who runs a natural health store here in town (Bozeman, Montana) and had gotten a few supplements I felt most confident might help fight the cancer. I was blown away by the shear amount of natural remedies which have been used to fight cancer in humans, and a little overwhelmed by all the options but much of what this dietary expert was telling me seemed to match with what holistic vets online were saying, so I made a few decisions and went with it.
I started with CBD oil, cordyceps mushrooms and yew tip extract (from the Pacific Yew tree) to fight the cancer, as well as Omega-3 fish oil for omega-3s and borage oil for omega-6's which would now be lacking due to sudden lack of any grains in which they are most commonly found. CBD oil is confirmed to attack cancer cells of various types of cancer (possibly all) while cordyceps mushrooms has been found to combat lymphoma specifically (as well as breast cancer and a few others I'm forgetting). My main problem was knowing proper dosage, so I did my best as guessing based upon everything I knew and had been told, and I have now come to find out I was apparently under-dosing on both the CBD and mushrooms, which we'll get to in a minute.
The yew tip extract has an interesting story regarding the discovery that it had cancer-fighting capabilities. Apparently it started in the 1960s when a forestry specialist working for the USDA, Arthur Barclay, began working with cancer researchers, collecting the bark from the Pacific Yew tree and passing it on to the researchers. It was eventually discovered that despite the yew tree being very poisonous, it contains a substance called taxane which come to find out helps fight cancer, by killing cancer cells. In the end that research program pioneered what is today one of the most popular pharmaceutical 'chemo-pills' on the market for humans, Taxol(now made synthetically).
But the story of the yew tree being used to fight cancer doesn't end there. The researchers were thinking that since the nutrients flow through the trunk of the tree into its branches with the least of it getting to the bark, that maybe the concentration of the active cancer-fighting substance would be found in higher quantities, so they began collecting the yew tips and researching them. Sure enough the taxane is apparently much more concentrated in the tips than in the bark, and I was told by this very knowledgeable fellow that it is now being used as a part of the natural cancer care program at one of the best natural cancer clinics in the country in Colorado, which for the life of me I cannot remember the name or find the flier he gave me, but there were some amazing testimonials, so I went with some yew tip powder as well, and was also happy to be using a local product, made in Montana!
All went well for close to a week on the new diet with all the supplements and the makeshift natural anti-cancer regimen, and Pepper seemed to be getting noticeably better ever day, all the way through last Saturday which it seemed was her best day since she first got noticeably sick over a month ago. Here are a couple photos from last Saturday - we were enjoying the Montana outdoors up in some densely forested mountains collecting firewood for heat for the winter (we burn firewood in a wood stove as primary heat source in winter).
(Photo: Roommate Chase helping collect firewood while Pepper enjoys playing in the woods, which had some pretty fall colors going on.)
Then on Sunday she was tired, understandably, but she also stopped eating except for treats. Still not eating on Monday, so I'm feeding her as many treats as I can, and get her to eat a little other food. Got a vet appointment for Tuesday but then missed it due to crazy car problems so reschedule for Wednesday. Now I'm worried as all the tips the vet gave me to get her to eat aren't working, and she was clearly in a lot of pain, breathing heavily and it looks like a lump is developing on the side of her face. Get her to eat a marrow bone Tuesday night and a few bites of meat and some treats but nothing else. Took her off the yew tip as it is to be fed with food or on a full stomach. Kept giving her the mushrooms (powder in a capsule in peanut butter) as the package says they are fine on empty stomach, and CBD oil on her treats one a day.
On Wednesday the lump was much larger and come our appointment, the vet was extremely worried. Told me euthanasia was an option I could go for right then and there, as she didn't have much hope Pepper would bounce back from this. Vet got her to eat a half can of wet chicken food in there, and seeing I wasn't ready to give up said Prednizone was the only option to get her to eat again and give her any chance at all. She thought for sure the lump was a tumor spreading from the lymph node but put Pepper on antibiotics in case it was just another infection. Said even with the Predizone she didn't expect Pepper to have more than 3 weeks tops, and reiterated the best it can do is add 3 months life expectancy. But it works wonders at increasing appatite so I went ahead and got a weeks supply. Also was prescribed a opioid painkiller which I gave her that night and then immediately stopped as I hate those things and she started eating again!
After that she was eating more everyday, fresh eggs/meat/veggies for breakfast and raw grass-fed lamb patties for dinner. Then I began upping the CBD oil from 1/2ml to 1ml/day and got her back on a regular schedule of supplements now that she was eating again. Come Friday, the lump burst and began leaking puss - gross I know - so I rushed to the vet as my job that day was nearby and the doctor was able to see me. Turns out it was just an infection, and the abscess draining was a very good thing, and Pepper actually seemed happy without a baseball lodged on her face up against her right eye. Only problem is the vet anticipated dead skin to fall off and create a larger hole, which sure enough has now taken place, but still seems better than when it was a lump with no open wound. Pepper began to really get back to being herself over the weekend - below is a picture from Sunday which was a very cool and rainy indoor day - just one of those gloomy days but I was feeling about as good as I had been in weeks.
Monday was another awesome day and we played fetch for awhile. Then we met with a very knowledgeable veterinary nutritionist and got Pepper on a zero-carb diet which I plan to dedicate an entire post to in the future so won't go into the details, but it is raw meat with supplements to replace the vitamins and nutrients coming from fruits and veggies. She also had me double Pepper's CBD oil dosage to 1 ml 2x/day, and doubled the dosage of cordyceps mushrooms, and had me take Pepper off the borage oil to be replaced with supplement more suitable for canines. She agreed with my thinking that we should take Pepper off the Prednizone now that she was eating again and doing better, to give her immune system a chance (Prednizone suppresses the immune system among other things).
She had also seen canine lymphoma patients successfully fight the cancer with natural raw diet, supplements and medicine, and go on to live 1-2+ years to end up dying by something else entirely, which gave me quite a bit of hope we could win the battle. Especially considering how well Pepper was doing since her first close-call when the vet said maybe only 24 hrs, and we were now at 5 days doing better ever day. Overall, sounds like much better chances and life expectancy than Prednizone or chemotherapy, the reason I chose to fight this naturally from the beginning.
We also had an awesome sunset walk on Monday evening to finish off the day:
As I write this, Pepper is sleeping and hasn't been doing so great today (Tuesday), struggling to walk well as her rear legs are giving out on her, but otherwise ate her new raw food for breakfast (not eating is one of the biggest signs they are in pain) and just seems to be really tired but am a bit worried. No Prednizone this morning either. We will surely find out more at our vet appointment, and that should finish off the post for today.
Now writing on Wednesday again - turns our the vet visit was bad news - the doctor gave Pepper 24 hours max, recommended euthanasia on the spot but I declined. She said Pepper's liver was giving out and thought she might not even make it through the night, and it's possible the Prednizone is responsible for that if her liver was already compromised, which is my suspicion but I don't regret doing it as it helped give us those few extra good days together. If her liver was already that weak, it probably would have given out on its own within a weak anyway... Pepper ended up passing away last evening as the vet suspected she would, but thankfully no drawn out pain, and looking back I am so glad I declined euthanasia and opted to give her another night in hopes she would miraculously bounce back, as it was the best end I could have hoped for if she wasn't strong enough to keep fighting, and clearly she wasn't.
Maybe tomorrow I'll make a quick post on the burial we gave her today, and a few more related posts will surely follow. Also hoping to get another post with more pictures of the baby chicks, as they are growing fast and I've got a bunch more cute pics since my first post on that. Right now I'm just sad, and out of words, so that will be all for now, with a few final pictures of the pup from the past 2 months. R.I.P. Pepper, you were a great loyal companion for 9 years, and your memory will live with me for the rest of my life.
(Photos: Way up in the Gallatin mountain range in Montana getting firewood in a location with epic views)
(Photos: Walk up the irrigation ditch trail with Pepper, Chase and his dog Stormy - early September, Gallatin Valley, Montana)
(Photo: Backpacking, Hidden Lakes, Gallatin mountain range, SW Montana - mid September)
Peace everyone. Hope you found the post informative and inspiring, despite the sad ending. If you appreciate the content, I appreciate the upvotes, resteems and shares - thanks so much for all the support and I'll be back with more posts soon enough.