This is a blog about Billy – our wonderful best friend, who happens to be a bull mastiff. Billy started limping on Christmas 2013, and by early January, an X-ray showed what appeared to be a large tumor in his left rear leg, which seemed to be destroying his bone. Within about two weeks, a biopsy confirmed that it was Osteosarcoma – a malignant bone cancer. As soon as we suspected that it was cancer, we immediately went to the web to look for resources. We started reading about osteosarcoma, the treatments, and the outcomes. It didn’t look good for poor Billy. We were told by the vet, and also found on the web, that amputation is usually recommended, as long as the cancer has not spread into the lungs. The whole situation was shocking, and we had a hard time wrapping our heads around it, and imagining how we would be able to handle this.
We came across the Tripawds blog and started reading posts about amputation, and reading stories about real dogs and their humans, going through the very same situation, and coming out on top! Some stories ended with sadness, but overall, we found so much strength from seeing dogs who were able to rid themselves of pain and suffering, and return to just being a dog, for at least some time. This gave us hope and strength.
We decided that we would create a blog to share Billy’s story, with the hope that it would help others who will go through this in the future, and so that we’d have a lasting artifact of our journey with Billy. From our very first post, we were overwhelmed with support from the tripawds community – people (and dogs) who we’d never even met, would be going through this with us.
