We found out last week that our sweet 8 year old doggie CB has terminal bladder cancer.  We are devastated.

For those of you who don’t know him, CB is 80+ pounds of pure joy, unencumbered by the burdens of intellect and common sense.  What he lacks in smarts, he makes up for in boundless love.

Eric and CB have been together for over seven years, even since Eric picked his buddy up at a black dog sale at the local pound.  Yep, CB was the clearance dog.  Upon taking him home, Eric discovered that his giant puppy cried about everything…so he considered naming him Princess.  However, he changed his mind, deciding instead on Crybaby, or CB for short.  I, however, have called the poor animal everything under the sun, from Biski to Biscuit to Booski to Boodle.

I’m responsible for bringing his sister, Addie, into his life, and making him Beta Dog in his own home.  After a couple of very short fights, during which he immediately started crying loudly, tried to curl up into a (very large) ball, and simultaneously demonstrated to me the reason for his name, he tucked his tail between his legs and allowed her free reign over his house.  He is now lorded over by a 32 pound fox-looking Shiba Inu mix with a Napoleon complex.  To his credit, he still refuses to listen to any command issued by me, opting instead to look at me earnestly with the biggest eyes you’ve ever seen immediately after stepping on my bare feet and sneezing on my legs.  Maybe he’s smarter than he looks.

Anyway, I’ll spare you the details of how we found out he was having problems, but Eric took him in for some testing on Halloween.  The following Thursday night, Eric met me at my car when I got home to tell me he had cancer.  Needless to say, it was a rough night for us.  Worse, Eric had found out the night before, but he hadn’t told me because he hadn’t wanted me to have to deal with it at work.  I had taken some heavy migraine medication on Wednesday night, and while I was sleeping, our dear friend and vet, Beth, called to give Eric the horrible news.  He told me later that I woke up a few times that evening and kept asking him what was wrong.  I guess somehow I knew something was off.  Anyway, he had to deal with the first 24 hours by himself.  Terrible.

We took CB to see a veterinary oncologist yesterday, and we learned a lot about dog bladders and the surrounding anatomy.  The short story is that his cancer is presenting in a very abnormal way.  He doesn’t have one discrete mass like most dogs with this kind of cancer get.  So after spending several days processing the reality that our dog has cancer, this woman came into the examining room saying things like “if it’s not cancer….”  And now we have this tiny glimmer of hope that it’s actually this horrible infection that only looks like cancer.  But the problem is that my heart is focusing too closely on that tiny glimmer and enlarging it to the size of, well, about the size of an 81 pound mutt.  So now when we get back the results of this next series of tests, my heart is going to break again.  Awesome.

In the interest of making this already long story a tad shorter, I’ll just say that there’s been a lot of back and forth in deciding where to do the next biopsy and exactly what procedure to do, but chances are it will take place this Thursday, November 13.  We’ll get results back in “5-7 business days,” as if medical test results are some piece of USPS mail.  So weird.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about how completely amazing Beth has been through all of this.  She met us at her office on a Sunday afternoon when we first noticed that CB was sick.  She has given us breaks on her emergency vet fees more times than we’ve even noticed, I’m sure, because she’s as sneaky as she is kind.  She cried with Eric on the phone when she told him CB’s diagnosis.  She has made herself available by phone and text though this whole mess – for nearly a month now.  She referred us to the oncologist, then talked to the oncologist after CB was seen, then spent an evening on the phone with us letting us recap the whole visit with the oncologist.  She’s just incredible, and we don’t know where we’d be without her.

So what does CB’s illness mean for the Panama trip?  Well, not good things, that’s for sure.  The plan had always been (at least as far as I’ve been concerned) that the dogs were coming with us.  And we’re not taking a dog with cancer to Panama.  We’re also not leaving a dog here to die of cancer while we go to Panama.  We’ve been considering going forward with our plans to be there from January 8 through mid-February and then seeing where things stand from there.  Nothing is definite yet.  And of course we are keeping Katie, our friend who just bought her plane ticket to come see us, in the loop.  Luckily she had planned to come during that first 5 week period, so if we stick with that plan to go just for the first part of 2015, it won’t affect her visit.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few days being frustrated, not only that our poor baby is sick and that a lot of hard times are in store for him, but also because all of our plans unraveled so quickly.  Yesterday in the vet’s office though, I put my head down and talked to God for a minute, and asked him to help me to let all of this go…to give it all to him.  To stop trying to control it.  He’s so much better at figuring all of this out than I am.

Today I found myself right back in the same spot I had been in before I prayed yesterday.  So I prayed again.