Arwen had her 11th birthday on July 10th! Hurray! We are beyond happy that our sweet girl has hit 22 months post-op. I still remember the sinking feeling in my gut when Arwen’s oncologist told us we could expect her to live 9 to 12 months if we did both amputation and chemotherapy. I tried calculating how much love and adventure I could give Arwen in a year, and now we have been fortunate enough to get almost double that.
Arwen has spent a lot of time paddleboarding this summer. She swims, too. Both are good low intensity exercises that don’t cause her to place too much strain on her joints, especially since she mostly lies down when paddleboarding. Though she occasionally does stand up.
Of course, she isn’t perfect and has fallen off a couple of times. We keep a life jacket on her in case she falls when we are far from shore, but that hasn’t happened yet.
As much as I hate to say it, we have finally started seeing Arwen slow down a bit. If we spend part of the day at the lake, she seems really tired that afternoon. Sometimes, she even seems not much up for a walk or her physical therapy exercises the next day. It’s not obvious or too bad, but we did finally buy her a stroller as a birthday present. We have only used it twice so far to see how she takes to it, and she seems to like it fine. We plan to still walk her daily, but to start going farther. When she gets tired, we’ll put her in the stroller and let her enjoy a long walk without the work.
As always, we wish must luck and love to anyone else going through this. Hang in there. Some dogs do last past their prognosis when diagnosed with osteosarcoma.
