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Cody’s Journal: Fighting Cancer from a Dog’s Point of View
Translated by Alan Thomas
June 24, 2001
Hi, my name is Dakota, but my people call me Cody most of the time. I’m an Australian Shepherd and I was born on April 19, 1996. My favorite thing is chasing tennis balls. I also like chasing my little stepsister, Cheyenne. She’s an Aussie, too, and runs really fast. Sometimes I head her off and knock her down. Then she jumps up and pretends to bite my ears, so I chase her some more. We do that everyday until we get tired. Lately, I seem to have a hard time keeping up with her.
Today I went for a regular visit to see my vet, Dr. Sharon Klintworth, at the Veterinary Medical Center in Atascadero, California. She smiles and laughs a lot and treats me very well. Once, she pulled a foxtail right out of my eyeball. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t very cooperative about it. In fact, I tried to hide under a chair. But she crawled on the floor after me and pulled it out clean as a whistle. My eye sure felt a lot better.
Anyway, on this visit she was giving me an examination as usual. All of a sudden she stopped smiling and got real quiet. She was feeling my neck and behind my legs and said there were some really big glands, whatever those are, that shouldn’t be there. My human dad, Alan, looked concerned about that, too. Dr. Klintworth said I might have a kind of cancer called lymphoma. I don’t know what that is, but I could tell from their reaction that lymphoma is not good, not good at all.
She put a needle into one of my glands and said she would do some tests. Then she talked about it for a long time and Alan asked a lot of questions. When we went home, he seemed really sad. He told my human mom, Lee, about all this and said something about two months. Then, she started to cry. I went over and put my head on her knee. Sometimes that makes her feel better when she’s unhappy about something. But this time, she just hugged me a lot and kept crying.
All of this was very unusual. That always makes me nervous.
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Cody
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Cheyenne
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