This is Faith! She's 10 years old and the sweetest baby girl you'd ever meet. On Easter Sunday, she was very suddenly and very unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV Lymphoma in her liver. Because of the aggressive nature of the cancer and her atypical presentation of the disease, Natalie and I are trying to get her set up for chemotherapy as soon as possible. Without chemotherapy, the doctors have told us her health will likely deteriorate in the next month or two, and my heart is breaking.

While we can't be given a true estimate of the time we have left with her because of how her illness presents, we were told that dogs with a more typical presentation of Lymphoma that undergo in-hospital chemotherapy can survive up to 12-18 months, sometimes longer. I know that's not a long time, but it's a lot longer than I am going to have with her if I can't do anything at all.

Faith is my whole world. I love this dog more than I can possibly put into words. And while I know that this journey will end with me having to say goodbye to her far sooner than I am ready to, I would like to try to do everything in my power to make sure her remaining time here is spent as happily and as comfortably as possible. The best way for us to do that is to start chemotherapy and hope we can get the disease into remission to keep it from spreading elsewhere in her body.

Her treatment options that we are looking at are either an at-home oral chemotherapy, which is the least effective of her chemotherapy options. The doctor quoted us about $300-$400 a month for her to have this medication. The second option we are considering is monthly in-hospital chemotherapy, which we were told could run to $400-$900 per appointment, depending on the drugs being used. Because the Lymphoma is in her liver, the primary way of checking her response to chemotherapy will be bloodwork paired with repeated ultrasounds and liver aspirates, which we've been told run between $300-$500.

Since April 1st, we've already accrued $5,525 in emergency care costs for Faith, which Natalie and I have put on CareCredit, and this is before we've even started chemotherapy treatments. That current balance puts a limit on what kind of treatment we can afford to move forward with, and freeing up some of that CareCredit balance now would make a huge difference in what kind of treatment we can move forward with for Faith.