Thanks again for all of the good emotions flying our way.  It helps, and we do appreciate it.

My wife and I are both engineers by trade, and we're very analytical thinkers.  We have been analyzing the *you know what* out of this situation since the initial tentative diagnosis by our normal vet, and we have had an "evolving plan" the whole time.  As new information comes in, we retabulate the options and recalculate the "scores" of each.  We have killed many trees in composing pro/con lists to amputation plus chemo, amputation alone, pain meds alone, pain meds plus palliative radiation, stereotactic radiation plus chemo, etc., etc., etc.

After first visiting Dr. Worley at CSU (without my wife), I was solidly of the opinion that we should amputate and do chemo.  That's when I made my first post here.  But after talking with my wife, doing more research online (most of which said something like "as long as your dog has a good spirit, she'll do fine"), and watching Beamer's behavior, I was starting to doubt two things: 1. that her pain would be too much for meds to handle, and 2. that we and she would be able to handle the amputation.  That's when my plan shifted to palliative intent, mostly pain meds, with the option of palliative radiation therapy as needed down the road.  That's when I made my second post above.

Then I spoke with Dr. Worley again on the phone, and asked her about my 1. and 2. above.  She was very accepting of my decision (which is really too strong of a word, but I don't have a better one in my vocabulary) to go in the palliative direction, but she cautioned me again about the pain of OSA, and kind of jarred me into realizing how much her behavior had changed in the past two months.  She also reassured me that they would be able to help with Beamer's recovery period, and that we wouldn't not need to watch her 24/7 for two weeks (i.e. take extended time off work) afterwards.

This is what changed my mind.  I talked with my wife yesterday morning about it, and at first she was resistant (which I expected), but after I left for work, she emailed me saying that Beamer's obvious pain (she would put almost no weight on that paw by this point, and wouldn't do anything but lay by my wife's side all morning) was starting to change her mind, along with having done some more research on the palliative radiation that had made her reconsider how much it would help with the pain.

That's when I called Dr. Worley and made the appointment for the surgery today.  Since they are a teaching hospital, I am interfacing directly with a vet student (Anastasya) for most of this, and she told me this morning that Beamer will most likely be going into surgery around 2pm MT today (30 minutes from now).

So I guess that's enough to post for now.  Thanks again everyone for the helpful advice and kind thoughts.  I will definitely be posting here as her treatment progresses, and I'm thinking about signing up for a blog to document it even better.

Nice photo, Jerry!  You and Beamer actually have some features in common, and I swear she had that same sprinkled donut toy as a youngster.  I remember because we used to roll in like a wheel down the hall and she had great fun running after it trying to catch it before it (and she) reached the dead end wall at the end!   I also remember it because it was great fun (*eye roll*) collecting the donut fragment by fragment as she tore it to bits over the course of about 9 months.

Here's Beamer this morning, her last 4-legged photo:

I will type up our pros/cons list(s) when I get a chance and share them here.