[Gigismom83]

Hi guys.

I posted several weeks ago about a lump that was on Gigi's outer lip. Gigi is a year and a half year old morkie. Turns out it was a grade 2 mast cell tumor, and it was removed. Long story short, it took two surgeries but now it is 100% gone with no trace at all. Good news, right? Well...

After getting the amazing results back about the surgery and the mast cell, we also got back an MST panel which shows what's going on internally. She had an ultrasound and x-ray and found no signs of spread of the cancer, however, the MST panel showed some red flag cells that the doctors say "could or could not divide and spread." Given her young age, we decided to be aggressive and do chemotherapy and kill these cells, but I am really hesitant about this too. Has anyone gone through this before?

Gigi's treatment starts this Thursday. She will have 4 weeks (once a week) of vinblastine and be taking Prednisone orally daily during the treatment. The oncologist says that the major side effect of all of this is a lower white blood cell count, which may then require the use of antibiotics. I guess doctors have to tell you everything, good and potentially bad, but I just wish they would tell us that with only four treatments, Gigi will likely be fine.

What would you guys do? I don't know about lifelong side effects that this can cause...i.e., can it shorten her lifespan? I've emailed the oncologist today about that but haven't heard back. We're doing this to kill these cells once and for all, but every time I read online about chemotherapy, I am just reading about dogs that have advanced cancer, which doesn't appear to be the case here. It's just these darn red flag cells that she has that the doctors don't know what will do, if anything.

Any advice you can give would be much appreciated. She has been acting herself; happy, healthy and rambunctious. I don't want to take that away from her.

Thanks all.