Surgery was done in my Vets4Pets Herzeliya Pituach clinic and took more than 3 hours. This was one of the most difficult and challenging surgeries of my 30 years career. The mass was enormous, 15 cm across (in a 20 kg dog), it had a very thick root of about 10 cm, attached to the inner back at the retro-peritoneal area near the kidneys. When we touched it, it bled. We literally wrestled with the mass, trying to delicately ease it out of the body as we tied off blood vessels inside the mass, and tried to separate the mass from the inner back body wall, where it was attached like glue. There were moments when we were worried she might start to bleed uncontrollably. The mass had the consistency of spleen but more fragile. It looked and felt like either a giant old hemorrhage that had organized into this 15 cm diameter ball (owners had mentioned a fall in the past onto the belly), or it was a tumor, that was undiagnosed on cytology.
Chupchik was wonderfully and surprisingly stable during the 3.5 hour long anesthesia, and woke up feeling fine. The assistants in Herzliya took good care of her; she ate, walked outside a few hours post op, but didn’t urinate, which worried us because she had received loads of IV fluids in surgery and post op. I took Chupchik home with me the evening of the surgery, and she remained by my side for 4 days, at home with my family, at work in the Jaffa clinic with Dr Tom and Sivan the assistant, and me.
Initially when Chupchik wasn’t urinating, we did an ultrasound to confirm that the bladder was filling; it was. Then we worried that a ureter (the “tube” that delivers urine from each kidney to the urinary bladder) may have run through the mass and been nicked, and tested for that; all tests came back normal. We repeated ultrasounds, blood tests, abdominal fluid tests, and kept checking for blood loss. Chupchik finally urinated the day after the surgery and "never looked back”.
After 4 days we saw there was no internal bleeding, and her blood values, checked every day, were stable; we felt it was safe to send Chupchik home. She returned for several rechecks and follow-ups, but in fact all was fine.
Chupchik is one of those very special dogs a veterinarian gets to meet only a few times in a lifetime; with an almost human, serene, kind, understanding old soul. Although I worried day and night for several days about her, I also enjoyed her company. She gives off a great energy and was a wonderful patient, and a good friend, as we looked into each other’s eyes day and night.
The histopathology result on her mass, which came back from the lab a week post-op, revealed it was in fact a malignant ‘bad’ tumor; hemangiosarcoma, the same kind we usually find in the spleen and liver. Life expectancy after such a diagnosis is usually only months.
Chupchik’s family decided not to do chemotherapy or follow up further. She is 12 years old, and they will keep her as long as she is enjoying life.
At the time of writing this post It is now over a year post op and Chupchik has returned to her old lively happy self. Being a dog, she has the good fortune to not know she has cancer, and not worry about tomorrow. She is happy, eating well, and enjoying the ‘now’.
Thank you to Chupchik’s family for being such terrific, loving, responsible pet owners; she is a lucky dog!
Recently, about a year and a half after Chupchik’s surgery, we received a sad e-mail from Chupchik’s owner saying “last night Chupchik went to sleep and didn’t wake up this morning. You’ll be happy to hear that she lived well until yesterday”. We were very sad to read this e-mail but very happy to know that we were able to give Chupchik 18 more months to enjoy life and her owners to enjoy her.
