Hi,
Rosie is a Lurcher. (For those in the US, a Lurcher is a hunting dog that is used to catch rabbits, hares and foxes. They are a mixture of breeds usually from the sight hound and terrier families and can include any of the following: greyhound, deerhound, collie, saluki, whippet, irish terrier, beddlington terrier, just to name a few. Rosie is a Deerhound/Greyhound/Collie mix . They are a very gentle, intelligent and obedient breed.)
Nature wise Rosie has all the best attributes of a Lurcher: quick to learn, well behaved, perceptive – a pleasure to have around. Temperament wise she is Sanguine: joyful, positive, quickly forgets the negative aspects of life, sociable, lively, energetic. Basically whatever she does is filled with enthusiasm, energy and joy. She had a lousy start to life and had every reason to be miserable: her initial owner had two small children and when Rosie started puppy biting, instead of dealing with it, they merely locked her in a shed and left her on her own for the vast majority of the time. Most puppies would be traumatised by such treatment but not Rosie, she just bounced back.
She is a very dirty dog who always looks scruffy and unkempt. We can go out on a walk and my other dog will come back spotlessly clean while Rosie will be covered from head to foot in filth. She just cannot stay clean. She also always has a dirty bottom with excrement plastered round it and she hates having her bottom cleaned.
She has never been vaccinated. Lurcher men tend to be much closer to nature and all of the ones that I have known have been against vaccination and have raw fed their animals, so it is highly likely that Rosie’s ancestors haven’t been vaccinated. Also, in the UK vaccination isn’t as common as it appears to be in the US with the vast majority of people that I know never having vaccinated their animals. It tends to be more common among pedigrees and those that do dog training, agility or kennel their dogs. Lurchers also have the benefit that they only breed from the healthiest stock as a dog that isn’t capable of working is no good to them.
I first spotted Rosie’s tumour when it was fairly small: 1cm across
This is a link to a photo of the tumour when I first found it:
myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kerrysphotos/rosie_tumour.htm
She has a rough coat and when I first spotted it I thought that it was a large sheep tick peeking through the fur but as soon as I parted the fur I realised that it was a tumour. I had her through to the vets and he said that it was a basal cell carcinoma. He advised removal, but I refused.
When I first found the tumour she had no apparent change on the mental level and so I only had the mentals of her normal character to go with and used the following rubrics.
MIND - CHEERFUL
MIND - VIVACIOUS
MIND - SOCIABILITY
But I did think that I had a cause: the disharmony within her home environment and for this I used the following rubrics:
MIND - EMOTIONS - suppressed
MIND - AILMENTS FROM - discords - chief and subordinates; between
MIND - AILMENTS FROM - discords - parents; between one's
On a physical level she was a very hot animal even in the coldest of weather and would lie in mucky icy ditches or run into the sea to cool off. This aspect of her didn’t change and I included the following rubrics:
GENERALS - WARM - agg.
GENERALS - COLD - amel.
I also used the following three rubrics:
SKIN - EXCRESCENCES -
SKIN - EXCRESCENCES - red
SKIN - EXCRESCENCES - smooth
I didn’t really have much else to go off because I had no real changes in nature or behaviour at this stage. The remedies that came up were:
Sulph, lach, nat-mur, lyc, graph, thuj, nit-ac, nux-v, carc, phos.
Reading up on the remedies Sulph had many of Rosie’s traits and I felt that this remedy fitted her on an innate constitutional level. Looking back now I feel that I was trying to include too much of her and not enough of the disease state but I didn’t have anything to really go off. None of the other remedies really seemed to fit. I wasn’t really thinking clearly as panic was guiding my judgement and that is most definitely not a good place to start from. I decided to go with Sulph and used Ramakrishnan’s dosing protocol. I used the Sulph week 1, Carc week 2, then Sulph 3. At the end of the first week Rosie aggravated on the Sulph and became possessive over food, something that she never normally did. After four weeks I felt that I was definitely on the wrong track as the tumour was growing, and in fact the growth rate seemed to have speeded up considerably. The tumour eventually reached the size of a large grape.
I was in complete panic mode by this stage and decided to use Ramakrishnan’s approach of using Arsen-brom as an organ specific remedy that covered basal cell carcinomas but it was a big mistake and I stopped it after two days. It made her drastically worse on a mental level: restless, depressed, clingy and desperate not to be left alone, and also made her very sensitive to touch.
I was frantically reading all the info on cancer that I could find (Grimmer, Cooper, Clarke, Burnett, David Little’s course, F Master, etc) and was rapidly realising that I was making things worse rather than better. I read that too much of a remedy can actually make a tumour grow more rapidly and I feel that this is what I did. I was now in a situation of the tumour growing more rapidly and I had made a mess of her on a mental level. I decided to throw in the towel and just pass it across to a Classical Vet Hom, but my emails to one went unanswered, so I persevered. I re-took the case and included the new mental symptoms alongside the physical:
MIND - RESTLESSNESS
MIND - COMPANY - desire for - alone agg.; when
GENERALS - SENSITIVENESS - Externally
MIND - DESPAIR - life, of
I wasn’t sure about the last rubric but it did seem to cover her attitude of being completely weary of life and not even wanting to walk. I find choosing rubrics for an animals mentals very difficult.
I also tried looking at how the following rubrics or combinations of rubrics would affect the repping:
GENERALS - CANCEROUS affections
GENERALS - TUMORS
SKIN - EXCRESCENCES
GENERALS - CANCEROUS affections - epithelioma
I use RADAR and the Synthesis rep most of the time. With RADAR it makes it easier to experiment with different rubrics.
In the end I narrowed it down to these remedies:
Ars, phos, lach, nit-ac, nat-mur, sulph, mag-m, graph, hep, merc, med, nux-v, ign, aur-m-n, abies-c, tax-br.
Reading up on the remedies I felt that Mag-mur was most appropriate. I gave this in an LM1 following David Little’s guidelines for dosing with a test dose and then dosing as needed. Rosie became more energetic, became less restless, lost her clinginess and the sensitivity also diminished. I felt that I was on the right track, but unfortunately this remedy helped her on a mental level to a certain degree but had no effect on the tumour. I was back to the drawing board.
I again looked at the remedies that had come up in the rep and decided to give Graph a try. Again she had positive reactions on the mental level but no movement on the physical, or at first had no movement on the physical until suddenly the tumour ulcerated and developed a large crater in the middle with a whitish/grey base.
At this point I just sat and wept and thought ‘What the hell have I done!’ I decided that I would definitely have to find a Vet Hom to take over her case, but it was late on a Friday afternoon and I knew that it was unlikely for anyone to start dealing with it until Monday. I set about writing her case up again on the Friday evening and while doing so I looked at remedies that covered the ulceration and the totality of the case. Ars-alb came up strongly in the rep and reading up on the remedy it had a description of the ulceration that fitted with Rosie’s tumour. I decided to give her a dose of 30c that evening in the hope that I could have some effect on the ulceration.
Anyone who doubted how effective homeopathy was could not have failed to believe in its efficacy after that weekend. The tumour went from a gaping ulcerated crater to a perfectly healed and healthy looking tumour in 48 hours (contradiction in terms I know!); it didn’t even develop a scab it just healed up and became smooth and red all over. I finally thought that I might be on the right track though Ars didn’t seem appropriate for Rosie’s case as a whole. Unfortunately my enthusiasm was pretty short lived. After the initial effect on the tumour no progress was made and if I tried redosing I just got aggravations on a mental level even if I altered the dose size.
Again I sank into despondency and wondered what the hell to do next. Then suddenly the tumour developed little pin pricks of puss all over it and a couple of them quickly opened up to bigger holes. I moved her onto Ars-iod and finally found the turning point in her case. From that moment on things didn’t look back: the infection cleared, the tumour started to shrink; slowly at first but then rapidly, so rapidly that you could see it becoming smaller every day. I had Ars-iod in stock in a 6c, 12c, 200c and a 1M; I didn’t want to use a high potency on her and decided to use the 12c. I always dose using a Medicinal Solution. It was difficult at first deciding when to redose; I found that if I dosed when things seemed to be slowing down, then I would get an aggravation, but I managed to work out that the best time to dose was when Rosie started to lick at the tumour. She might go for three weeks without a dose but then, depending on her stress factors, might need a dose twice in one week. Over a 3 month period she had about 8 doses of the 12c. We have now reached a point where the tumour is just a raised area on the skin about a millimetre deep and the 12c is no longer moving it forward. I have just started her on a 30c and hope that this will finish off the last bit of tumour.
This link leads to a photo of it now:
myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kerrysphotos/rosie_tumour_1.htm
Kerry
Kerry was asked if she had considered Ars. She said that the reason she hadn't gone with it was due to the modalities.
Rosie was always VERY hot and better for cold, even lying in the sea with the waves crashing over head in the bleakest of winter weather, weather that
would give you hyperthermia without the dunking, and she seemed to thrive in wet weather. Kerry said that these modalities were the opposite to Ars.
