Lily is a shih-tzu that I got from the parking lot of a Target shopping center in December of 2009. I begged my parents to let me get her for hours and finally they allowed me to. She was a quirky little puppy. When she was little she would lay in my hair and roll around in it. She also liked to nibble and bite ears, toes, and fingers. Lily quickly learned that her ball was her favorite toy that she could never part with. She picked up how to play fetch very quickly! She was a lively little squirt!
In March of 2016 Lily jumped off of my parents’ bed and hurt her front paw pretty badly. She wouldn’t put any pressure on it. It was so swollen that she couldn’t straighten it. We thought she had broken it. We took my poor gimpy puppy to the vet where they x-rayed her arm. Instead of finding a broken bone they found a small abscess where they thought something had bitten her and caused and infection that we were unaware of. I knew that another animal couldn’t have bitten her because she is taken out on a leash every day and is always with someone. The vet lanced the infection and gave her a pink cast to wear for a few days. We gave her the prescribed antibiotics and after about a week and a half the infection was gone. She proceeded to be the crazy, weird, and fun puppy she is.
About a month later I noticed that her arm looked abnormally large. I showed my husband and he seemed alarmed. I immediately called my mom to ask for her advice. She told me to take Lily to the vet as soon as I could. I took Lily to the vet the very next morning. The vet told me she wasn’t sure why the infection had come back and that she would take a look at it again. I had to leave my poor sick puppy there all day. When my mom picked her up that afternoon the doctor informed her that the would didn’t look like an infection, so she sent a biopsy off to be checked out. About 5 days later she called with the results. On April 27, 2016 I got the news that my sweet, loving pup had a form of skin cancer that had spread to the muscle in her front arm.
After a lot of research and many tears we decided that amputation will be the best option for her at this point. It is a very scary decision to make, but we want what is best for our fur baby.
Sorry that you and Lily have to deal with this, and amputation is major surgery, but once you get over the first 10 days to 2 weeks, most dogs seem to do really well as tripawds. You are making the best decision you can to provide her with a pain free quality life.