Tony is our sweet 5 year old boy. Today, he was diagnosed with Cutaneous epitheliotropic T cell Lymphoma along with an autoimmune disorder that causes severe bacterial infections affecting his skin. We are so devastated to get this news, but we wantto do everything we can to help Tony feel better. Tony was completely healthy up until last year. We have been to several vets and specialists, have traveled and continue to travel hours out of town to get him treatment. As bad as the pictures look, we still have hope that cancer treatments will help him.
This all started around beginning of June 2022. 6/13/22: We took him to the ER for facial swelling. They gave us antibiotics and benadryl. Then we went to another vet and put him on prednisone and an antibiotic.
6/17/22: He started to look worse, so the vet put him on apoquel and he got worse.
By 6/25/22 he had lost most of his hair and was losing pigment on his face and skin and wasn't getting better. It was actually getting worse.
7/10/22: We stopped all his meds and changed his diet.
7/22-7/29: we went to Seattle and he seemed to be feeling and looking better.
7/30/22: you can see his hair has started to grow back and he is getting better.
By 8/3/22: most of his hair has grown back and he is doing well.
9/3/22: he is back to his old self.
11/28/22: Tony is healthy again and totally normal.
Now this year (2023), we started seeing issues around July, but not as bad as before. We managed his care and kept it under control but he had a large wound on his paw that wouldn't heal for months, which is when he got an infection.
7/25/23: We noticed his lymph nodes were swollen.
For 2 weeks, the vets gave him the cephalexin and prednisone, which reduced the swelling and the helped treat cuts and sores. The vet reduced the prednisone to 1 pill a day for a week then 1 every other day.
8/9/23: By this date the vet upped the prednisone to 2 every other day and changed him to the clavamox.
8/16/23: Tony slowly began getting worse, his health was declining. He started to lose more hair and pigment, and began developing sores on his side, anus is dry and bleeding and his under belly was starting to get dry.
End of August: The vet suspected cancer, but after doing several scrapes, needle aspiration, and biopsies, they said it’s not cancer. We were relieved! So we continued to treat as we had been, but Tony wasn’t getting better.
We started to look into other specialists and got the next available appointment with a dermatologist.
12/6: We drove from Clovis to Marina Del Rey to a dermatologist specialist. That appointment took 4 hours. They examined Tony, did several scrapes and biopsies, cultures, labs and gave him stronger antibiotics and pain medication. They suspected cancer with an autoimmune disorder causing the repeat bacterial infections and skin conditions, but we had to wait until the results came back. In the meantime, we scheduled an appointment with an oncologist in Los Angeles just in case of cancer.
Today, 12/13: We received the worst news that Tony has Lymphoma. This is not what we wanted to hear, but we want to give Tony a fighting chance. We have upcoming appts. in LA with the dermatologist to continue treating the autoimmune disorder, skin infections and wounds and an appointment with the oncologist to start treatment. Oncologist have viewed his case and believe he has a fighting chance. We are not ready to give up on Tony knowing he can go into remission with chemo and dermatology treatments. Any donations made will contribute to Tony’s current treatment plan and future treatment plans.
Tony is the sweetest boy and we know that he is not ready to say goodbye
