Oliver has Hemangiosarcoma...

I faced a similar situation with my French Bulldog Boris a couple of years ago. He was 12 years old. I realized that his gums were suddenly very pale (a sign of anemia). My vet checked him over and suspected a mass on the spleen... an ultrasound confirmed that there was indeed a mass and it appeared to have spread to surrounding organs. He couldn't say with 100% certainty that it was malignant but we was almost certain that it was. He said with surgery, it would still probably only give him a few more months. I opted not to put him through a hard surgery and recovery and the vet told me that he wasn't in pain at that point and would probably drift away peacefully... but also told me what signs to look for if he took a sudden turn for the worse. I just didn't want him to go through additional pain that he wouldn't understand to buy him a few more months. Had he been younger and there was a guaranteed recovery and promise for a quality long life, I would have done more. I brought him home and spoiled him not knowing if he had days or months. The vet had me give him Yunnan Baiyao which is a chinese herbal supplement that helps with bleeding internally and got the anemia under control. I kept him on that for the rest of his life. He was also on other meds for other pre-existing conditions.

He managed to surprise us all and lived almost two years longer. We just lost him this last February. So it probably wasn't cancer and we'll never really know because we didn't do the surgery to verify. At the end, we don't know what exactly was wrong as the blood work and other tests didn't show anything obvious. But he was very sick and we knew it was time to let him go peacefully. He was 14 which is quite old for a Frenchie.

I know it's a hard decision.

krandall said:

Hemangio is quite common, and for a long time it was thought to be somehow related to large breed dogs. Then it started to be seen more and more common in smaller breed dogs as well. Now there has been found a high percentage of Hemangio tumors have Bartonella bacteria (a tickborn disease) in them, even when there is no evidence of Bartonella in the dog’s blood.

The theory now is that the disease was seen more in large dogs first, because they are exposed to ticks more than small house dogs” are. Now that ticks are SO bad in many places, even little dogs are getting exposed to infected ticks, and more cases of Hemangio are showing up in smal dogs too.

An 8 year old Havanese belonging to a Veterinarian/breeder friend of mine died of Hemangiosarcoma last summer here in the Boston area. 😢

Bartonella Bacteria Found in Hemangiosarcoma Tumors from Dogs

Researchers find more evidence of a possible connection between persistent bacterial infection and blood vessel cancer in dogs.

news.cvm.ncsu.edu

Click to expand...

That's interesting. I know someone that lost a very young (maybe 2 - 4 year old) Pug last year to this. This person is a breeder/owner/handler that takes every precaution and is quite over the top in every thing they do for their dogs and in breeding . The young one just collapsed one day with no warning and sadly passed away. There was no warning, no suffering... she was fine one minute and gone the next. They were beside themselves and had a necropsy done to try to get some answers. The results were surprising to say the least and they were trying to figure out any and everything that could have caused it. She was questioning wether the imagining done on potential breeding parents for hips, patellas, hearts etc could be a problem. She was just really beside herself and looking for answers as to how this could happen to such a young, healthy dog and never wants it to happen again. They do go camping with the dogs often and when traveling to shows and like to hike (where ticks can be...)