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Well, it’s been a continued roller coaster ride since my last Maggie post. On Friday I received a call from the surgeon that the initial pathology reports were looking more like cancer than an injury. We would know more after they performed some special stains to help sort out what type of cells were present, and whether it was a response to injury or a cancerous process. That meant another weekend of waiting, because the results would not be available until Monday, late in the day, or Tuesday.
When my phone hadn’t rang by Tuesday at 2 pm I knew something was up and called back down to Iowa State. I was told that the pathologist on the case was out of town and we wouldn’t have results for another week. This was completely unacceptable to me, so I got on the horn to the pathology department, and as luck would have it one of the pathologists I hold in the highest regard was in the process of sorting out the slides even before my call. He called me back within 30 minutes and after talking him through the history and comparing the information from my end with what he was seeing, he was very confident that all of the abnormalities were associated with an injury and the repair process. The cells definitely had the characteristics of a cancerous tumor (basically tumors grow rapidly, as does damaged/repairing tissue), which explained the slowness of the diagnostic process. Two weeks after the initial event, I could finally breathe a sigh of relief.
Maggie continues to improve dramatically, though we are still facing two more weeks of forced rest. After that we’ll start the physical therapy process, and I currently have the over-ambitious goal of one last end of the season hunt. I have two posts that I’ll try to share in the next week, a detailed account of the events of the last week, and a recounting of the unbelievable number of injuries and near-death experiences this dog has had in her seven short years.