Stage 4 cancer - breakdown of comments from vets

  we was given this information from our vets as when they called to advise our dogs results were in we took not a lot of it in due to the shock of the news. on the phone they advised us that it’s stage 4 cancer and they didn’t really expand on this, is anyone able to provide any extra information based on the vets notes?

Hello - I'm sorry you had the news of your dog's cancer to deal with.  That must have been shocking, even if you were expecting it.  The good news is that your vets should be well experienced in delivering complicated news and really shouldn't be surprised if you need them to explain it again.  This time, take a pen and paper and ask them to summaririse the main points.  This lab report really is difficult ot read - it was inteded for the vet, not for you - it is their job, that you are paying them for, to explain it in a way that you understand it. However, if you want to read the lab report, my advice with this one would be to ignore the cytopathological description.  This is:  'the technical detils of what the pathologist can see when looking down the microscope' and is always described in technical language, which require some level of pathology to understand and won't necessarily add anything for your purposes.  The 'comments' section is more legigble but again, the vet needs to help you both to read it and to understand the implciations.  Their training will have prepared them for the fact that shocked, upset owners don't take everythig in first, or even second, time.   A malignancy is a cancer that spreads, and aggressive means that it does so aggressively, markedly.  'Metastatic potential' may mean where it  could potentially spread to.  Ionised Calcium (a calcium level that can be measured in the blood) is a 'negative prognositic indicator' i.e. the prognosis (outcome) is more likely to be poor if this is high.  They say that it might be advisable to do further scans to look for signs of spread, and to look at the opposite anal gland because sometimes the diease is present on both sides. Good questions for your vet include:  what does this mean for my dog?   Having received this report, what do you think a realistic, good outcome for (my dog) would look like?  What would a bad outcome look like?  Can we do anything to turn the outcome round to the positive end? What past record is there of this working for dogs like mine?  They may want to see the ionised calcium before they can comment on this, so it might make sense to have this converation when the results come back.  I hope that something there helps.  

Ps you, or someone else, may have asked on the Facebook page what 'malignancy' means in relation to this case.  I'm afraid that 'malignant' does tend to relate to cancer, of a type that tends to invade normal tissue.   'Metastases' are secondary cancers, where the first has spread - perhaps in the blood or lymphatic fluid - to a different place in the body.  For example, an animal with bone cancer might have 'metastases' or 'mets' (secondaries) in the lungs, or the cancer may have 'metastasized' there.   I have reread my response and apologise if my language came over as condescending when I suggested taking a pen and paper to the vets  -  it was not meant as such, but a very real tip.  I find that vets can often say a lot of long words / concepts very fast, one after another.  By signalling to them that you want to write down the most important points, they will often slow down and explain the situation more clearly, thus providing you with a chance to control the conversation a little more.