Clyde went to the vet for a checkup and his last melanoma vaccine last week...the doctor is really pleased with how he is doing.  He thinks that the tumor has continued to shrink a little bit, and the brave guy is still not really showing any symptoms, so life is good for him!  The doctor is recommending doing another vaccine in six months (of course, I immediately said "Do you really think he'll be alive in 6 months?"  The doc said he has no reason to think otherwise and again reassured me that he thinks Clyde looks great...of course he then joked that he wouldn't blame me if I didn't believe anything he said since nothing he has said to this point has really panned out.  I guess we just have to have some sense of humor about this to keep from going crazy...).

Although there isn't a lot of evidence for its usefulness with melanoma, we are going to go ahead and try metronomic chemo.  Since Clyde doesn't feel sick at this point, we want to make really sure that he doesn't feel any side effects - if there is anything at all that compromises his quality of life, we will stop right away.  Despite the lack of lots of scientific data on it, the vet thinks it could very well help a little bit.  He assured us that we didn't have to do it - that we had pretty much exhausted the standard protocol so we should feel fine about doing nothing else.  However, my decision was based on the fact that if I could have even one more quality hour (or even 5 minutes!  anything!) with Holly, I would have done anything to make that possible.  Being so aware of that right now made me feel like if this has a chance of helping at all, I want to try it.

Unfortunately, I didn't do quite as well at this appointment as I did at the last...I pretty much cried the whole way through.  To be honest, every time he said something positive, I seemed to get worse.  I just kept thinking about how badly I had wanted to have this conversation about Holly.  I wanted her chemo to be done and to hear how well she was doing.  I researched metronomic chemo a few months ago - but all in the context of Holly.  I thought that we would eventually be discussing if we should do it with her.  It just breaks my heart that we didn't get to celebrate more ampuversaries and good vet appointments and all of that happy stuff.  So yeah...1 step forward, 3 steps back.

Right now, we're on a trip that was originally supposed to be Holly's trip - on the day she was diagnosed, we promised her that we would take her on a vacation.  It was supposed to be all about spending some good quality time with her.  Back in April, August seemed so far away...but still well within the amount of time that we thought she would survive, so we truly believed we would have this time to spoil her and just generally have a great summer with lots of great memories to cherish.  Now it's a spoil Clyde/honor Holly trip, but I am definitely feeling her loss particularly strongly right now.  When we get back, it's back to the vet for us...we wanted to wait to start Clyde on the chemo until after our trip so that we wouldn't be in the middle of nowhere if there are any problems and to make sure that he can just enjoy himself and feel good this week.

I thought I was actually going to manage a short update this time, but obviously that's impossible for me! As always, thank goodness for Tripawds - it helps so much just to let all of this out and know that there are people here who will understand.