Hello and thank you for reading chapter 1 of Greta’s story. On Monday, March 3, 2014, I noticed my five year old Terrier-Schnauzer mix (that’s what she looks like to me anyway and yes, that is her in my profile pic) was having a problem with her back left leg. At the time she could not put very much pressure on it and was using intermittingly but there was obviously something going on. The first thing I thought was I hope she didn’t tear that thing that will force me to crate her and have to fork out a lot of money. She’s never been crated and I don’t think she would handle that very well. She is very active, there are 2 other dogs in the house and she likes to keep busy. I was hoping it was a sprain that would soon go away. It didn’t.

We went to see the vet that Saturday who took an x-ray and concluded it was likely a partial ACL tear. We went home with Rimadyl and were going to wait for it to go away. It didn’t and as a matter of fact had gotten worse. I cannot explain this but I never thought it was an ACL tear. I have absolutely no basis for this thought and no experience but the way she held the leg up and back didn’t seem like a comfortable position for a ligament tear. She couldn’t put any pressure on it at all at this point.  We went back this past Saturday, March 22, 2014. This time the thought was it had probably gone from a partial to full tear. About half way into the exam I had remembered the vet saying something about 90% chance of ACL tear so I asked what the 10% was. I’m a little foggy but I believe he said bone tumor. So we decided on a second x-ray to see if anything had changed. Wow, I would pay a lot of money to be able to go back in time and have him walk back in that room and say ‘yeah, it’s was a partial tear and now it’s full.’ But, he didn’t. He said ‘this isn’t what I was hoping to see’ and delivered the bad news that Greta had a bone tumor.

I agreed to have the x-ray sent to a radiologist for opinion who concurred but could not say it wasn’t a fungal infection. I completely expect any vet or physician to cover their butts when unable to base a diagnosis on solid test results. I’ve read enough about bone infections in dogs to be comfortable skipping a biopsy for confirmation. I’ve also read how painful the biopsy is.

So my plan is to amputate and treat holistically as follow up due to the higher cost of chemotherapy but mostly because of the miserable side effects and some good outcome stories I've read about dogs treated holisticaly. I’m following my gut which tells me that her outcome is not going to be significantly different enough, if even at all, to debate the two approaches. Her amputation is scheduled for next Monday, March 31, 2014.

I will soon post my drug treatment plan once I have completed it.

Thanks again for reading and caring and thank you to the moderator who suggested I start my own thread so you could meet my pup and learn her story.

PS - I should mention how I got here. After spending many hours with my friend Google, I stumbled across a thread on this website titled 'Holistic approach to Osteosarcoma', which provides an awesome plan for holistic treatment of osteosarcoma and has alot of what I had already found and was planning to implement.