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Magic Bullet
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Help Your Dog Fight Cancer
An Overview of Home Care Options
Featuring Bullet's Survival Story
By Laurie Kaplan
Conveniently enough, Laurie Kaplan reviews her own book for us in the following paragraph:
"His 'bedside manner' was perfect. He spoke clearly, explained everything to me in an unrushed manner and he took his time answering all of my many questions thoroughly."
She's talking about the vet who supervised chemotherapy for her beloved Bullet, but she could as well be talking about her own book. It's like having a calm, friendly, no-nonsense person sitting next to you, explaining everything you could possibly want to know about cancer in dogs, from possible-and-avoidable causes to treatment options to home care to moral, emotional and financial considerations. She even names two kinds of harnesses that do not put undue strain on the lymph nodes, which is how we came to know about her book, since our Hug-A-Dog harness is one of the two.
Fifty percent of our dogs will have some type of cancer in their lifetimes. This is a widely accepted estimate in veterinary oncology. If accurate, this means that 30 million of the dogs that are now in our homes and our hearts are destined to be diagnosed with cancer.
Ms. Kaplan is self-taught on the subject of canine cancer, and the story of how that education became necessary begins and ends the book. Formerly the editor of Catnip, a newsletter about cats published by the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, she decided in 1992 to expand her three-cat household to include a dog. At the shelter, she found and bonded with Max, an eighteen-month-old Siberian Husky turned in by his owner for being untrainable. She took him and renamed him Bullet. As in escapes-faster-than-a-speeding.
Ms. Kaplan had the strength and patience, through Bullet's escapes and destruction, through rejection by kennels and professional dog trainers, to work with the dog she came to love and to never give up on him. That strength and patience were to become her mainstay when Bullet was diagnosed with lymphoma. Through long months of chemotherapy, through subsequent life-threatening heart problems, through a recurrence of the cancer, she worked to teach herself what she needed to know to give her dog not just a life, but a good life. And if you can find some of the strength she and Bullet displayed, she will teach you how to do the right thing by your cancer-stricken dog, right down to a photo-illustrated lesson in making your own dog food.
We let Laurie Kaplan begin this article; we will let her close it, with a quotation from a section about how your dog can sense, and will respond to, your emotions in a time of crisis:
My message is not to put on a happy face, but rather to actually have a happy face and a happy heart. Hold him close and let his fur absorb your tears on occasion but, for the main, stay upbeat and positive and be truly grateful and full of joy for the time that he has been with you and because he is with you now.
