Not sure where this goes because it's not a treatment and recovery, but not an original diagnosis. (Admin, feel free to move thread where you see fit)

Hypertrophic osteopathy. It's a mouthful. I'm told it's rare. What I read is that it can happen in dogs who have something wrong in their lungs (fungus, lung mets). I spent awhile trying to find a good picture of it, and it looks like the xray on this article (although the case study is not the same as ours)

http://www.ncbi.....MC1899852/

Basically it looks like Coral. But not pretty coral, oh-we've-been-to-the-ocean, coral. No. This coral is overgrowth. A spiderlike overgrowth of hard bone. An evil, painful slow swelling of the limbs. And Caira Sue has it. 

A couple months ago we noticed her remaining front leg getting a little bigger. We figured it was strengthening from all the extra work it was doing.

We had noticed all her limbs getting a bit swollen last month. I kinda thought it was part of the disease process-and it is, but not in the way I thought. I thought it was some kind of strange dog edema. What are you going to do? It's cancer, and everyone with cancer gets edema.

We treated her with multiple antibiotics for fevers. We thought she had a UTI, a this, a that, maybe some other thing. Now we know that all that pain, those fevers were due to this ugly coral-like growth.

2 days ago we went to the Oncology Vet at UCDavis. We brought in our chest xrays from a couple weeks ago (where we went to the er for the fevers). He said it wasn't as bad as he thought it might be. The lung mets aren't our girl's problem. 

Treatment? There is no treatment. It just gets worse. You have to remove the underlying cause (infection, lung, etc). Well, it's in both her lungs. 

So the theory goes like this: Normally you have osteosarcoma and you get lung mets and die. There's no time to get anything else because you get the lung mets first. With inhalation chemo (the Gemzar study we joined at UCDavis), we targeted very specifically the chance of lung mets. So they were held back. Then other tumors and oddities were allowed to grow. (she has tiny tumors along the insides of her legs and a large one in her abd...all new in the last week). What we have learned from this is the inhalation chemo works....it has suppressed the lung mets enough to let odd things come up....and that a 2nd line of chemo needs to be given (in the beginning) with the inhalation chemo in order to suppress all the odd things from coming up. 

I'm trying to explain this so that someone else going through these forums someday and looking for options will know a couple things.

1. Inhalation chemo works against lung mets and could extend your dog's life past mere amputation

2. combine it with another form of chemo to combat the other things.

If someone is searching this forum ages from now, please PM me and I will probably be able to explain it better. I'm a little emotional right now and it makes it difficult to type.

Caira has had an amazing 6.5 months. I am forever grateful that we were able to take part in this study. We could fill ourselves with what-ifs (what if we did the other chemo, etc). But it would do no good. We did the best we could with what we had at the time. We gave her our everything. I wouldn't change that. 

But this hypertrophic osteopathy. It's an ugly, bad, horrible thing.