Identification of the alien in Cody's chest

Well folks, the alien is out and the results are in! It is the best news we could have hoped for...at least for cancer. It is a "well differentiated papillary bronchogenic pulmonary adenocarcinoma, grade I, excision complete".  The terms "well differentiated," "papillary," "bronchogenic," and "pulmonary" are descriptive terms. Read as: a protruding tumor of mature cells of the lung that orginates from the bronchi. Adenocarcinoma is a cancer of an epithelium that originates in glandular tissue. Tumor grading is a system used to classify cancer cells in terms of how abnormal they look under a microscope and how quickly the tumor is likely to grow and spread. Grade I tumor cells look almost normal and are less likely to spread. A complete excision means that the entire tumor was removed and did not appear to extend beyond the margins of the tissue that was sent to the lab.

There was also no evidence of cancer in the lymph node that was removed and sent to the lab. Good.

Better news would have been something totally benign like a granuloma, or abscess. But at least we are dealing with a cancer that has a lower probability of having spread. The oncologists have told me that we should always expect there to be some microscopic cancer cells lingering and therefore they do recommend chemotherapy.

At this point I am holding off on chemotherapy. I feel fairly confident that we got all of the tumor and that if there are stray cells floating around that we can deal with them another way. I've decided to investigate alternative therapies.

How is the dog? Cody is great! Back to urinating and defecating normally. Happy and really started driving me crazy about 10 days post-op asking to play with his ball. His incision is healing well. We just got a new 3B cold laser at our practice, so I've been using it to treat the surgical scar. The photo is from 13 days post-op and day 1 of laser treatment.

The long scar is the incision where they went into the chest. The 2 smaller parallel scars is where the chest tube was located.

I also noted grey hairs in Cody's muzzle for the first time today. Coincidence? Or is the grey the body's response to the recent stress (both from the cancer itself and the surgery). Humm...