abby's house of pie

as promised a few days ago, i am catching up on a bunch of backlogged posts. abby is doing well. she is no longer relegated to wearing a lampshade and her stitches have been removed. we discussed the cancer treatment options with the vet last time we were there. he said that treating her with prednizone only (what we were going to do) would probably do more harm than good because of the extreme side effects doses that large have on small dogs. the chemo would probably make sure the cancer was gone, but it costs $2500-3000 a pop. and there's no way to know how many "pops" she would need - it's more of a do one round, see how it works, determine if another round is needed, repeat until no more rounds are needed thing. that could get super crazy super fast. so for now we have opted to do nothing. the vet was encouraged that the surgical margins (excised skin around the tumor) were clean, i.e. no cancer. she is a bit of an enigma though, because in general grade 3 tumors do not have clean margins. so maybe we caught it just in time, or maybe she's just a weirdo. we have an appointment in early january to have her looked at again to see if there are any signs that the cancer has spread. the good news is she is acting like her old self again. super bonkers, tail wagging like crazy, knocking over everything in her path (poor christmas tree ornaments!) in fact christmas night, jeremy and i were cleaning up the kitchen after a monster day of holiday meal prep. while our backs were turned, abby pulled a fruit pie off the dining room table and went to town. by the time we got to her, it was almost all gone. after that, i pushed in all the chairs to make sure she couldn't get up to the remaining pies and hoards of cookies. but... the next morning i came in from taking bailey and jackson out for their morning business and i found abby standing on the dining room table face-deep in a pumpkin pie. i have no idea how she got up there. she either jumped straight from the ground (doubtful, if you have ever seen the production she puts on when jumping into our bed which is considerably lower) or she jumped up on a chair several feet away from the table and made the flying-squirrel leap to the table. in a period of about 8 hours she consumed 2 whole pies. bonkers!