My boys are growing up

Here is a photo I snapped the other morning (please excuse the unmade bed and the dog blanket on top) .....

Archie is almost 23 weeks old and Morty will be 2 in July - Morty is around 34kgs and Archie 23kgs in weight so thinking they are also still lap dogs can become painful

 

oh thanks everybody ... we think they are absolutely beautiful animals but we are a tad biased

we are having some health problems with little Archie so its been a stressful couple of months recently but he's an absolute delight to have with us ... he's been diagnosed with a Iris Melanoma in his left eye - thankfully after several scans, xrays, blood tests we found out that the cancer hasn't metastasized and seems to be contained in the eye at this time.... so we're going to try laser surgery on Monday down in Sydney to kill off/remove the tumor in the eye but it only has a 50% chance of saving his eye ... if it doesn't work then the eye will need to be removed .... but the most important thing was that the cancer hadn't spread - 1 eye or 2 he will live a long normal life and ultimately thats the most important thing for us ....

So on Monday if you've got some positive thoughts to spare, we'd appreciate any you have ... he's so young and this is a freak of nature thing to have happened, its never been seen in a dog so young but hopefully we will have some good news soon .....

 

Thank you for your kind thoughts ....

Well we had some mixed news - bad news is that the tumor had almost doubled in size since we saw the vet a month ago ... this means being bigger it required more laser treatment to more of the eye and it means it was pretty aggressive .. so the vet had to be aggressive back and this will cause at the very least some corneal scaring and at the most some other effects to the lens, iris, cornea and other parts of the eye .. good news is that he came though like a little trooper, handled the anesthetic just fine and is currently snoring his head off near my feet .....

We have an appointment back in Sydney Friday next week for a check up and then it won't be for a while before we know how well the treatment worked and if we need to do a 2nd treatment with the laser ... but we're another step closer to hopefully beating this thing!

 

Well we got the good news for Archie yesterday - vet gave him the all clear and we don't need to go back for another 6mths....

Apparently the treatment worked better than the vet had anticipated - he was amazed with the results .... we are all breathing a lot easier now!