We adopted Punkin from Great Dane club of Louisiana's Rescue http://www.gdcla.com/rescue.htm on July 4, 2007.  She was originally found waking the streets of Shreveport Louisiana.  When nobody came to claim her or adopt her, another GDCLA club member in north Louisiana saved her from the shelter and kept her as a foster Dane before she came to live with us in New Orleans.  Punkin was a great addition to our family and her and Manson hit it off great from the start. 

 In late December, we noticed Punkin started to limp on her right front leg.  After many visits to veterinarians, she was diagnosed with a bone tumor on her right shoulder blade.  On January 9th, we had most of that shoulder blade removed and had it sent off for biopsy results.  The results later came back as Hemangiosarcoma.  This cancer is a very aggressive, high-grade soft tissue sarcoma with the most common areas affected being the spleen and heart. Once the Oncologist learned what it was, he did an ultrasound and found she in fact had a mass in her spleen.  This is when we learned that her outlook wasn’t good at all.  Now that the cancer had spread to her bones, there weren’t many options left for her since by then the cancer was all over her body.  We could have done chemotherapy, but her life would have only been prolonged an extra month or two, plus we weren’t sure how she would react to chemo treatments.  So with that, we decided to take her home with all intentions to spoil the hell out of her. As the months passed, we started to notice more tumors appearing all over so we made another trip to visit the Oncologist.  He did some testing and found that all the tumors were cancer.  One thing though, she did not have any pain until the day before she passed away. 

Punkin lost her battle with cancer on Monday May 5, 2008.  We will definitely miss her.