One week out....

Rilley sleeping on the floor with one of his favourite stuffed animals.

Today marks exactly one week since Rilley had his brain surgery to remove the meningioma.  As you can tell from the photo above, he is doing just fine.  He is even beginning to grow some "peach fuzz" on his bald head and the incision is healing nicely.  The stitches will be removed in one more week, around the same time he will receive his first dose of the custom made vaccine.  When Rilley was discharged from the veterinary hospital, we were given instructions to keep him as still as possible and to not allow him to jump on and off the bed, nor to take the stairs.  Well, all we can say is...we've been trying, honest we have, but it is becoming extremely too difficult to stick to all the rules.  Regardless, he is continuing to recover very nicely.

The Crazy Cost of Medications

As a result of the lab work done in Minneapolis that revealed Rilley's high liver enzyme levels we have begun to back off his Phenobarbital and introduce his new anti-seizure medication Keppra.  We were warned that the new medication would be more expensive than the Phenobarb and how true that is!  To give you an idea, when Rilley was first put on the medication, we purchased 500 tablets of the Phenobarbital for roughly $84 CDN, this would last us around 100 days.  Conversely, 100 Keppra tablets cost $154 CDN and these will only last 22 days and he will be on this medication for the rest of his life.  If only I could add Rilley to my work benefit plan!  ;^)

Searching online Sara discovered that we could order 100 tablets of the generic version for just $28 USD but the online pharmacy doesn't deliver to Canada.  The ironic thing is, the pharmacy is located in Canada!  Surrey, BC to be exact!  Tell me that's fair!

Granted, Rilley will soon be completely off of his steroids, which is a very good thing, but the cost of that is negligible in comparison.