Hello, community!  

I'm Emily, and I'm the proud momma to Panzer, an incredibly affectionate, loving, and silly Rottweiler I rescued when he was about 9 months old.  Panzer is my first rottie, although I come from a family of big dog lovers (long succession of Newfoundlands) and have since adopted another Rottweiler to ensure that my home is sufficiently chaotic.  Panzer is also doing his best to win the award for the most expensive "cheap" rescue pup, as he has had both of his knees repaired (TTAs), and now he has officially joined the tripawd family.  

This phase of our journey started the Monday after Christmas when we picked him up from the kennel/daycare to find that he was noticeably limping on his right foreleg.  It was Panzer's first weekend of being fully cleared to rough house with no restrictions at daycare since his most recent TTA a few months prior, so I initially wasn't worried about him being a bit gimpy given how hard I know he plays there.  However, I soon had a bad feeling that got worse the next day when I palpated his leg and he was clearly tender.  On New Year's Eve, I sat on the floor with him, found the slightly swollen, painful part on his leg, and Panzer buried his head in my chest.  That was enough for me, and we wasted no time setting up an appointment with his surgeon to get an x-ray.  I had read all about osteosarcoma over the years, but I tried to talk myself out of the creeping fear that my sweet doofus pup might have it.  But, when our vet grimly came back into the room and put the x-ray up on the screen, the tumor was clear.  I immediately burst into tears.  An aspirate was performed, so we waited for the results but also set up an appointment with the oncologist since OSA was "strongly suspected" given the location of the lesion (distal radius) and that Panzer was a nearly-8-year-old male neutered Rottweiler.  

The aspirate sample was inconclusive, and I had to make the nerve-wracking choice of whether to go ahead and amputate without being 100% sure of the diagnosis or get a biopsy and wait another week for results.  After hours of going back and forth on it, a whole lot more tears, calls to the oncologist, surgeon, and my parents, I decided to go ahead with the amputation, and Panzer went in for surgery on January 8.  He came through really well, although we had to make a couple of return trips to get a replacement fentanyl patch, methadone (!!), and then a drain installed to deal with a big seroma he developed that made him look like he needed a mansierre.  After the 2nd trip to the emergency vet, I had the distinct impression that Panzer just missed all the vet staff and wanted more cuddles from them.  He has also thoroughly enjoyed his anti-cancer additions to his diet, including raw organic goat's milk and raw beef patties mixed into his usual Orijen and fish oil.  Bismarck (Rottie #2) is definitely envious of Panzer with all these special treats and makes a point of licking Panzer's bowl clean after each meal.

Panzer is gaining strength and a lot more comfort with each passing day, and he's already back to his goofy old self.  It has been a challenge keeping him sturdy on the icy, slushy Midwestern sidewalks, but Panzer is doing remarkably well learning to adjust.  He got his staples and drain out this evening at 10 days post-op, and now we just need to make sure the oncologist is comfortable with his scar healing progress.  Not sure if anyone else has experienced this, but at the intersection of the two big incisions, he has a small triangular patch of dead skin.  Our hope is that the tissue is healing underneath so that the skin doesn't need to be cut away, which would just delay our being able to start chemo.  We're also waiting on a second opinion requested by our surgeon and further information from the pathologist because Panzer's biopsy came back asking more questions than it answered.  Apparently, none of the tested samples of the mass produced any osteoids, so the pathologist wasn't able to definitively diagnose the cancer as OSA.  All we know for sure that he has right now is a spindle cell sarcoma, his lymph node is clear, and his chest x-ray is clear.  I'll probably learn more tomorrow, but I don't want to get my hopes up that it could be something other than OSA.  For now, the plan remains that Panzer will probably start chemo this week, assuming that the oncologist is satisfied that his healing is sufficient.

We're at the beginning of a long road, but I have already learned so much from this tripawds site and forums.  Thank you all so much for being here.  I know I'll need you.

Bismarck (L) and Panzer (R) pre-surgery and looking like conjoined twins.