This post is a little bit of a stray from my usual topics... but I figured having a good outlet would help me get my "mind right". Last Thursday we took our dog Ruby (picture above) to the vet, our precious 7 year old black lab Ruby. She has had a bump on her leg for several months and it appeared to be growing so we thought we would get it checked out. I think the reason we didn't get it checked out in the beginning was because we were afraid to know what it was. The vet did some xrays and they didn't look good, he said the words 'bone cancer'. More specifically, he said 'osteosarcoma'. These aren't the words you ever want to hear from your vet, especially because they are followed by "three months to live". Osteosarcoma is a very aggressive form of bone cancer, highly metastic and the outcomes are not good (less than 10% of dogs will survive beyond 12 months even with aggressive treatment). We opted to have a surgery the following day to get bone samples via a bone biopsy and have them sent down to the WSU vet school in Pullman to be analyzed. We are hoping the diagnosis based only on the xrays is incorrect. There is hope that it is something else, something less terminal and something that gives us hope. Long story short... I laid in bed all day Friday, cried my weight in tears and felt like my world was all of the sudden completely upside down. Ruby is recovering pretty well from the surgery itself but now we are playing the waiting game to find out the results. I really feel like I am sitting on pins and needles waiting... my heart is racing a million beats per minute and I have tremendous anxiety. I have been doing nothing but worrying for days on end... we might find out as early as today the results - our prayers are hoping for a miracle...