Louis Needs Cancer Surgery

Louis is a 14 year old poodle x papillon x Jim Henson Creature Shop creation living with Leo and Natalie in Sydney, Australia. On the evening of Monday, November 20, he collapsed on his way out for a walk, and was rushed to VSOS, an emergency animal hospital in Sydney's south. After being stabilised with oxygen, testing was done to find the cause of the issue, and long story short, it's cancer that needs swift, expensive treatment.

The first sign of something wrong was in his red blood count - it showed severe anemia, which was our first surprise because recent standard blood tests from our regular vet had not flagged anything like this.

A quick ultrasound showed that this anemia was due to severe internal bleeding into his abdomen, most likely from a tumor rupturing on his spleen. That's what caused the life-threatening crash, but before this moment, we had no idea that Louis was suffering from any kind of disease or illness. In the last few months, he has had regular vet care, including surgery under general anesthetic to remove some bad teeth, and he had an eye wound being treated by a dog opthamologist, so we knew he was not very comfortable or lively - he was wearing a cone and on pain meds for the eye when the crash happened - but no clue there was something worse.

Louis was admitted into the VSOS ICU overnight to await a more thorough ultrasound during daylight hours. When this was conducted on Tuesday, it confirmed that there was definitely dangerous bleeding masses on Louis's spleen and also signs of smaller tumors on his liver. While spleen tumors can sometimes be benign and removed fairly simply from the body via surgery, the fact that it ruptured and the fact that there are more growths on the liver suggest a kind of cancer called hemangiosarcoma that affects vascular organs.

This is an aggressive cancer, and this news was a heartbreaking shock to both us and to Louis's regular vet Dr Rob, who had not seen any risk factors in any recent blood tests. However, we were extremely lucky in that VSOS was our nearest emergency clinic. Another time and another place, and we may have only been offered palliative care or worse, immediate euthanasia, but the vets at this hospital are performing cutting-edge treatment via Interventional Radiology - something that exists in human medicine but is very new to the vet world. The department at VSOS is the first of its kind in Australia and they do the procedures in consultation with a specialist who usually works with humans.

After an emergency blood transfusion from a donor dog named Benji - VSOS has its own blood bank - Louis was deemed a viable candidate for a spleen embolisation. Rather than open surgery, Dr Karina and her team used endoscopy via his leg artery to turn off the arterial blood supply to his spleen, meaning it will die off and no longer bleed or grow more tumors. Dogs can survive without the spleen, and this surgery was successful - the internal bleeding stopped, Louis was stabilised and able to come home.

Dr Karina considered doing the same thing to the liver if it was adding to the bleed. Unlike the spleen, Louis needs his liver, but apparently shutting off a certain arterial blood supply in this way does not stop it functioning but DOES inhibit the cancer growth. However, this procedure is so new that they have not actually done a two-in-one before. They've treated dogs for both - done the spleen then the liver in another surgery - but they haven't done it all in one go and once they identified that, while there are lesions there, the liver was not adding to the internal hemorrhaging, they decided to just turn off the spleen in that procedure.

The endoscopic spleen surgery was life-saving, but not curative. It stopped him from dying that day, but we do not know what is going on or how bad it is. Longterm, he still has some form of cancer and on Monday November 27, a week after the crash, he is due to go in for a day of "staging" - getting a full diagnosis to make a plan for management of the cancer, whether that is chemo, another round of the interventional radiology into the liver, or both. He'll need biopsies to find out if they're right about hemangiosarcoma or if it is something else, and probably need a CT or MRI scan to accurately make the call on what is needed and effectively what his long term prognosis is likely to be.

The good news is, the vet team absolutely agreed it was worth going ahead with all this and giving him a chance - it's not a "nothing we can do" situation. The interventional radiology is something that they themselves still seem in awe of - they are seeing dogs walk out of the clinic happily with almost no recovery needed when in prior years, they would be dead. We were extremely lucky that we were able to take him to VSOS and they agree from here on, the next challenge is making sure we know what he needs to stick around happily for longer.

The bad news is, the blood transfusion, interventional radiology surgery and ICU stay have has basically sapped our emergency funds and our backups. The bill when we took him home was almost $14,000 AUD. We were able to scrape this together via every bit of money we had on credit cards and savings, redrawing against a nearly paid-off personal loan, borrowing money from some friends, and getting approved for VetPay (a high interest vet loan - the limit they gave us covered about half of that bill.) Leo also applied to cash out the maximum permitted amount of annual leave her work allows you to "buy back" but she will not receive this for another pay cycle in two weeks. The next stage is trying to use the equity on our house to redraw on the mortgage, but Natalie is on a disability payment currently, rather than the salary she had when the house was bought, so it may not be approved.

This is why we are asking for some help to get him the next stage of care as soon as we can - before anything on his liver can develop further and put him in danger again. The predicted bill for his "staging day" is $4000 AUD. We can cover this on the day with our last emergency credit card, and then we will have zero dollars for anything - food shopping, bills, we won't be able to pay them. Any direct debits, the regular mortgage payments, health insurance, they're all going to bounce until Leo is paid again in two weeks, and we may need money sooner than that, especially if another interventional radiology surgery is needed - that's predicted to be about another $6000AUD as well.

Louis is 14 - old, but not the end of the road for a small dog, and has been with Leo since he was a puppy - her first dog after a childhood of obsessing over the Reader's Digest Book of Dog Breeds and yearning for a dog of her own. He's always been a cheerful and patient big brother to his many temporary and permanent animal housemates over the years, including many kittens and Roxy the red fox - as well as come with us through many houses, many silly situations, and plenty of other medical issues we've been able to sort out for him - so we're not going to let him go over something like money.

Helping him could get him a few more months, or maybe a year or more. It could also be bad news and they may find something worse than expected when staging him. But we really don't want to be in a position where we have to say no to viable treatment due to not having the money. We just aren't those kind of people. We wouldn't be able to live with it.

This is truly a horrific situation for us. On top of this stress, there was a human death in Natalie's family on the same day as Louis's crash, and she has not been able to connect with her family yet due to focusing on keeping the dog alive. Many of you know also about our long term renovation problems - we literally do not have a kitchen installed in our house and haven't since 2020, and we were finally getting close to tackling that and having the funds to start getting work done again. That will not be happening any time soon. We also do not drive, so every time we have to travel with Louis, we are paying for Pet Ubers, and things like that.

If you are able to help us in any way, even the cost of a Pet Uber ride, please do. Leo is happy to thank any donors with digital art gifts if you would like to reach out to her - pet portraits and other designs. Natalie has many marketable skills she can't remember at the time of writing, but please feel free to reach out to her as well. Also, not sure if this is usually done, but if you're able to loan us significantly a larger amount than you're able to gift us - like, you could help us now but do need the money back eventually - please reach out about it and we can organise a plan to pay you back. Also, if the payment options here don't work but you are able to do it via PayPal, reach out to us for the address to send it to. Time is everything right now. We will try to keep you updated.