- For those of you who don't know,
this is Roxy, my Husky.
She's the OG rockstar that helped me
launch my social media career.
- [Newscaster] He has more than 2 million
followers on Instagram.
Talk about a fan club.
- Today I wanna share a very important story
of something that happened with Roxy.
It's a terrible situation.
As you can tell, she's now a tripod,
a three legged dog, and she's doing well
but this situation could have been avoided.
And I wanna arm you
with information that you should know when you
have to make a choice when your pet gets sick.
Roxy come.
Sit. Good dog.
Good doggie. You good dog.
So to set up the story, Roxy now lives with my dad.
So he takes care of her vet stuff,
takes her in for checkups.
And Roxy had sort of a bump growing on her right arm.
And this bump was there for several years.
It may have grown slightly over the course of those years,
but this bump never bothered her.
So I wasn't too concerned about it
but my dad said, "You know what?
I'm gonna point it out to the vet on the upcoming visit",
which I thought was a very good idea.
So when they went to go get this bump checked
out and an overall physical, they said, you know,
for 12 years old, this dog is doing very well,
in good health running all the time.
She's so fit.
She's so active.
She looks like an eight year old dog, but they said
we want to take a sample
of the bump on her leg and send it for cytology,
which means that under a microscope, they look at
and see what cells are there to decide
is this a cancerous lump, Non-cancerous lump, et cetera.
So after my dad went,
he gave my phone number for the vet to call back.
And then when the vet ended up calling me back,
they said "That unfortunately the cytology came back
and it looks like this is a cancerous bump."
They called it a sarcoma
which means that it's a soft tissue cancer.
And they recommended bringing the dog back in
for a consultation with the surgeon.
I know how surgery is difficult on humans.
And I could only imagine how difficult it is
on dogs who need activity in order to stay fit,
in order to stay mentally well, especially dogs like Roxy.
She's so active.
She's a Husky.
She has so much energy in her.
So I told my dad a list
of questions that I wanted him to ask the surgeon.
And those questions are questions that you should always ask
before going up for a procedure.
A, is this type of cancer that Roxy has dangerous in that
is it likely to spread?
Is it likely to cause problems elsewhere in her body?
What's the five year survival rate?
What impact will this have on her life as a 12 year old dog?
Is it worth for a 12 year old Husky to go for a surgery
on her leg to remove a tumor that so far has yet
to cause a problem?
And I thought my dad being a physician would be well armed
to ask these questions and I trusted him to do so.
I actually don't talk
to him the following day when he actually went
for the visit.
And the next day he sends me
me a picture of Roxy wearing a cast healing
up in the sun, in the backyard.
And I thought, "Oh wow,
she must be doing so much better because she's healing."
And he goes, "She's doing awesome post-op.
The doctor told me that it wouldn't be that big
of a procedure and that they could likely do this, you know,
in and out one day's time.
And they thought it was beneficial."
I was a little bit skeptical, but you know, seeing the fact
that she was recovering was very promising to me.
So over the next few days, things started to change.
She had to go in
for multiple wound checks to get her wound examined
because the area where she had the tumor,
she had a very thick bandage on,
my dad couldn't check it himself.
There were sutures in place, staples in place
and they needed to constantly check this.
So she was on antibiotics.
They were doing these checks.
I noticed that the bandage was
on really tight, but you know, I'm looking
at pictures and I'm trusting my dad and all this stuff.
And then like a week goes by and my dad calls me
while I'm working in the hospital and says,
"Mike, I need you to come home
after the hospital and look at Roxy's leg.
I don't think it's good."
And I'm like, "But wait, like, I'm not a surgeon, A.
I'm not a vet B.
If you think it's bad,
that that means probably we should go get it checked
out at the vet.
And he was like, "No, I have an appointment with him
like in two days, I'm gonna go then,
that's when the surgeon is there,
'cause he's on vacation."
You know, some complicated things,
so I said "Of course I'll come by."
So when I came by, I'm looking at Roxy's foot,
it was now unwrapped and this is a graphic photo
but I'm gonna show it.
Her foot was dead.
Her paw was dead. Like there was no blood flow.
It was a cold foot.
It smelled gangrenous,
which means it was becoming infected.
I was like, 'Dad, like, this is terrible.
Like she's gonna lose her foot.
Like there's no, like this foot has clearly not
had circulation for a long period of time."
And for me at what I wasn't sure of was this an issue
of the bandage being very tight or was this more
of an issue surgically that when they removed the tumor
they also took out extra tissue
and possibly the blood vessels that go down to her foot.
And my dad like never clarified this
with the surgeon, Roxy leave it.
So I was very like upset about that
and wondering the whole time A, should have Roxy
have gotten the surgery, B, did the surgeon make a mistake?
C, was the bandage on too tight?
And honestly, it's really hard to know
so that when my dad actually went in there
they basically said,
"Yeah, look, we think we should amputate."
And my dad, let me speak to the surgeon.
And I asked the surgeon, very frankly, like,
"Look, is this a mess up?
Did we take out too much, you know,
tissue that the blood vessel came out along with it?"
'Cause if you take out the arteries,
and the blood vessels that are higher in the leg
they essentially feed circulation to the bottom of the paw.
It would never heal the bottom of the paw then.
Or was it that the bandage was on too tight
and the rehab process, or is she an older dog,
and this is a normal complication that happens time to time?
And he basically said "All of the above."
And while I appreciate the honesty, because he said,
"Look, we had to take out a lot of tissue.
The tumor was larger than we expected."
I think like if I was working with a human surgeon,
I think that we would've thought about those risks,
that if we open up,
or are potentially getting ready to open up a person's body
and then we see that we can cause more damage
than actually benefit by doing a biopsy or removing a tumor.
We actually don't do it.
So I asked the surgeon,
like "What was the dog's staging of the cancer?"
And it was a stage one sarcoma.
And not to say that this isn't serious,
it's just at a 12 years old Roxy's life expectancy
is maybe another two years.
She's getting in that range.
It's sad to say obviously, but you know,
we're really hurting her quality of life
by putting her under the stress of that surgery,
plus the risk of the things going wrong, like right now.
So poor Roxy in recovering from the surgery was
barely able to walk, was very sick during that time.
And then now we're saying we have to amputate her entire leg
and not just the entire leg, the scapula as well,
because apparently dogs, this is the way to do it.
I asked about a prosthetic, but he said
that that would require a second operation as well.
And she would have to learn to use it
and an older dog and being a Husky
which is a breed that tends to be more picky with pain,
He said "That she might not even adapt well to it."
He recommended just taking off the entire leg
and kind of told me some new information that I didn't know
about dogs, that they tend to handle amputations better
than humans, because they don't have the psychological,
traumatic component of this,
where they don't miss having the fourth leg.
That you know, she's like, 'Okay, I have three legs.
This is what I do.
And that's who I am.
And that's the dog I am.
And I move forward."
Can I get a high five?
Where's that messed up task.
- Oh, good girl.
- Wow - Good girl.
Here you get bonus.
And because of that, they seem to rebound quite well.
And I will say outta this whole process
that's probably been the most accurate part of it,
that Roxy has recovered quite well.
Thank God.
She had a mean scar.
You can't really see it now, but it's healed up quite well.
We took out the staples a few weeks ago.
She's now going for longer walks with my dad.
When I come home, she's wagging her tail.
She's still shedding like a monster as you can tell
from all of my clothes, she's still super sweet.
She's happy, obviously slightly lower energy
'cause she fatigues.
And now I know she has higher risks
of getting arthritis in her legs because she's unbalanced.
She has to put more stress on each one of the joints.
Yeah. It's sad.
It's sad watching, you know,
your dog gets sick with whatever condition it is.
So all in all this goes to say, you know
when you bring your dog to the vet,
make sure you're armed with good information.
Make sure you ask hard questions
of both not only the general vet, but the surgeon.
Make sure they give you accurate risk assessments
because it's very easy to say,
"Oh, we'll just take this out.
Easy peasy, no problem."
But then like your dog can lose a limb
and it could be quite frustrating
because it feels like you didn't get all the information
but know that pets are sadly not immortal.
And you want to think
about their quality of life just as importantly
as you do the length of their life.
So hopefully Roxy continues to be a little rock star
that she is.
She loves her treats.
And I'm really glad that you know,
this terrible situation kind of had not the worst ending.
(soft peaceful music)