As I posted last time, we headed up to PA this past Thursday night for Bentley’s first vaccine with Dr. Mason’s study at UPenn. It was a LONG journey, as Brandon and I had both worked all day and then packed the car and drove 9 hours through the night. We arrived at 8am for pre-vaccine testing, and then they would administer the vaccine and do all of his follow up work. Unfortunately, during pre-vaccine testing – they found what ever parent dreads going through this..a nodule in his lung. My heart broke, again. Just when we thought we were going to beat this and everything would be fine.. we sat out in the car and cried for an hour (much better than the week I cried after Dx), and then I went back into bad ass fighting mama mode. After driving overnight 10 hours, having gone 36 hours with no sleep – we then had to decide if we wanted to take Bentley home and do something else (Palladia), or give the vaccine a try. After speaking with our Onc and Dr. Mason (head of the study), we decided to go ahead and give the vaccine a try. Since this is still in trial phase, there is not really any concrete evidence as to whether this vaccine can help get rid of lung met or not. There have only been 2 other dogs in the study with lung mets, but they were vaccinated at 1/3 the dose that Bentley will receive – and they had MUCH more metastatic growth in lungs. Bentley has only one nodule, about 2mm in size so we’ve caught it extremely early! We know that Palladia is an option, and has shown some promise – but we also know that it only gives an average of about 6 months – where as the vaccine is showing 1.5-2 years so far. We have decided to go ahead and give the vaccine a chance to work, and are going to keep Palladia as our back burner option if it seems as though the vaccine isn’t touching lung met. Dr Mason, and a friend of mine who is a research pharmacist who I trust very much – feel as though we should take Bentley off of all of the supplements he’s on right now to allow maximum efficacy of the vaccine. This is very scary for me, as I feel like I’m not doing all that I can if I take away supplements – but this vaccine has so much promise and potential to do amazing things for him, and since none of the other dogs that have had amazing results were on anything…I feel as though we’ve gotta give it a shot. Well be monitoring his met very carefully, doing chest rads every couple weeks – and will head back up to PA on April 18the for his second vaccine. As far as the actual vaccine, Bentley did well! He did have a fever, which is normal, but did not experience any severe side effects, nausea, or anything! He did end up staying overnight, but that’s because we ended up starting vaccine so late after lung met incident. He was very tired when we picked him up Saturday so he slept the whole 9 hours on the way home..but yesterday he was back to his silly self! It ended up working out great, I have a good friend that lives in Philly that I hadn’t seen in years so we went out for dinner and drinks with them and I had my first REAL Philly cheesesteak! 🙂 All in all mostly good news – camcer sucks and lung mets suck..but Dr Mason is absolutely amazing and was so good with Bentley and very helpful and caring with us – we are in great hands. And we’re staying hopeful that maybe Bentley will be the trailblazer and be the first dog to go into remission with lung mets in this study! Maybe he’ll go down in history and save lots of other babies! Still taking it one day at a time and enjoy every minute with my handsome man! Here are some pics from our trip.
