Rilley's fur is on its way back!

One thing we noticed this past weekend is that Rilley's fur is coming back with a fur-y!  (Pun intended.)  If you were to look at him face on, you would be hard pressed to tell that anything had happened.  Below is a comparison of two photos taken exactly three weeks apart.

Rilley's fur, then (three weeks ago) and now!

The one thing we had been wondering was whether or not the white stripe on his face would grow back. When he had been shaved, you could see the pigmentation in his skin which matched his fur colour for those areas, but it looked quite dark up the middle of his face.  However, as you can tell this distinctive mark of his is back!

Other news from this weekend is that he did not seem himself.  As you may have figured from our last post, Rilley had his second round of vaccine injections on Thursday.  One difference about this round was that he really seemed to be under the weather on Saturday.  From reading this blog, you may have figured out that he is very food motivated we knew something was not right when Sara sat on the sofa with a snack, and all Rilley could muster was to raise his head and have a look, as opposed to getting right in her face demanding some of the food!  After consulting with Dr. Ohlfest, it turns out that he may very well have had a low grade fever and may seem sluggish for a few days.  He explained that this is normal as long as it doesn't last for more than a couple of days.  We also noted that his injection sites felt a bit warm.  Apparently this is an indication that more of his immune system is recognizing and working on the tumour cells, which in turn is a good sign that Rilley's body is reacting positively to the vaccine.  However, we are happy to report that tonight he seems to have bounced back quite quickly.

Lastly, thanks to everyone's kind interest in Rilley's story, as of this writing our little blog has had 2016 visits since we started it in late October.  A large part of that is due to the spike in traffic as a result of Rilley's story airing on Daily Planet as well as the front page article written by Lisa Tallyn in the November 30th edition of the Georgetown Independent.