Today we decided to do the 2nd line of treatment. The good news is that Curly did go into remission in the past week, so we just need to have him stay in remission.
Yesterday, my husband and I had a conference call with the vet to discuss our concerns. The Madison Wisconsin (MW) protocol that works with 80% of dogs, failed with Curly. "Why did this happen? What does this mean? How do we know that the Tanovea protocol will work?"
What we learned is that the cancer genetic makeup plays a large role in whether or not MW will work. Again, we caught it early, so the natural route would be to go with the MW protocol which works for 80% of dogs with lymphoma. His lymph nodes did not shrink significantly enough after week 1. In fact, the vet explained to us that the cancel cells were growing still. The best case would have been for Curly to go into remission after week 1. Since he did not, and the cancer still existed, it still kept the lymph node enlarged.
Since the MW is a cocktail of chemo meds, we went three more weeks with Curly going into partial remission - basically, meaning while the "original" cancer cells died, there were new cancer cells taking their place...this means that the chemo drugs that were used in week 1-3 cannot be used again because the cancer cells have built a resistance.
Changing protocol to Tanovea means that it is a bigger bite of money but a shorter duration under treatment (the difference in cost between the 26 week MW and The 14 week Tanovea protocol is about $1K). Week 1 - Tanovea, Week 2 - CBC test, Week 3 - OFF, Week 4- Tanovea, Week 5 - CBC test, Week 6 - OFF ... so on and so forth until we hit week 14.
The current goal is to keep him in remission. We really won't know if Tanovea will work or not, but the hope is that his lymph nodes will stay small and we would likely know by week 6 if Tanovea is working.
If it doesn't work, then the specialist would want to introduce another chemo drug to do a combo of Tanovea and the other chemo drug. If this happens, we are going to stop treatment. At some point, as my husband put it, "we will need to pull the band-aid off."
So keep those positive thoughts and prayers for Curly coming our way. We really appreciate having a forum to share our story.
and [MENTION=11639]rjisaterp[/MENTION] praying also for Jewel 
