Tripawds Three Legged Dog & Cat Forum Archives

My tripawd passed away recently, and as it happened quite suddenly, I wasn’t in the right state of mind to ask questions and I didn’t ask for autopsy. Now I’m trying to understand better what happened, so I would really appreciate some insights.

The course of events was dramatic: one moment Razbeg was fine and the next he was clearly feeling poorly and was lethargic. In the emercency room it turned out that his pericardium had filled with fluid, thus preventing the heart from functioning normally. Because it was Sunday and an emercency duty, they couldn’t perform all possible procedures to find out the exact reason for this, but considering Razbeg’s age and the fact he had cancer, the most likely reason for his state was ruptured tumor (the fluid in his pericardium was blood). Although my first thought was that I wanted everything possible to be done in order to save him, the prognosis was so poor that finally I agreed to let him go.

Can tumors rupture just like that, or is there some reason for it? Now I know that what happened to Razbeg is typical for hemangiosarcoma, but to my knowledge he only had two lung mets that were slow to grow. Could those lung mets have caused this (according to radiology report his lung mets were near the heart)? Though I guess that if a lung tumor would rupture, it would bleed to the lungs, not to the pericardium. Is it more likely that he also had undiagnosed tumor in the heart? In x-rays his heart looked perfectly normal.

He was on leukeran for his lung mets and I read that one possible side effect of leukeran could be secondary blood cancer. Could leukeran have caused this?

I am sorry that this post is longish and contains more than just one question, but I can’t stop thinking about this and it would help immensely if I even understood the whole situation better.