The vet said that a definitive diagnosis could not be made based on the cytology results, and that Josie could have surgery to biopsy the lump. She said that I could just get the lump removed (which likely would require a skin graft to preserve her range of motion due to the lump’s location on her elbow) or amputate the leg entirely. I was initially extremely opposed to amputation, but throughout that day and the next day, Rebecca and I did some research. It seems like three-legged dogs do really well–they’re certainly able to balance with only three legs (we’ve even found stories about some dogs who can get along with only two legs), and they have no body image, so that’s not an issue.

This past Tuesday, we went to the NC State Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Raleigh, and discussed our options. I had thought that if they could do a biopsy without putting her under general anasthesia, I’d do that and then make a decision about amputation based on the histopathology results. But I learned on Tuesday that they needed to put her under regardless of whether they did a regular old (tissue sample only) biopsy or an excisional biopsy, so I figured since that was the case, I’d have the excisional biopsy (there was a price difference between the two, but it wasn’t enough of a difference to persuade me one way or another). Also, the surgeon who examined her said that there was enough skin to work with that they wouldn’t need to do a skin graft. They took her blood on Tuesday to make sure nothing was out of whack prior to surgery, and all looked good, so we were a go for surgery on Wednesday.

After providing a detailed explanation of Josie’s severe separation anxiety to both staff members we met with on Tuesday, I took Josie in yesterday morning for her surgery. They were going to try to get her in early in the day so that she could definitely go home that night, so I expected a call around mid-day to let me know how she was doing post-surgery. Instead, I had a bit of a scare when the fourth-year resident on the case called around mid-day to tell me that there was a “suspicious nodule” that appeared when they x-rayed her lungs to be sure there were no metastases prior to the surgery. She asked if they could do a fluoroscopy (live x-ray) to get a better look. The price was miniscule compared to the overall bill I was expecting for the day, so I said to go ahead. Then I freaked out for about 25 minutes, IMed Rebecca to let her know what was going on, and practically broke down when a former supervisor asked how my dog was. Then the resident called me back and said they weren’t able to find the suspicious nodule on fluoroscopy, so it must have been a shadow or something.

Finally, I got a call around 4:00 to tell me that Josie was out of surgery and starting to wake up. The resident said the surgery was really quick, and that the surgeon’s gross assessment was that it was cancerous (which we already kinda knew, based on the cytology), and that we’d probably need to follow-up with Oncology to discuss the next steps after we got the histopathology results in a few days. She told me we could pick Josie up around 7:30, then called me back at 5:30 to say that Josie was doing so well, we could pick her up anytime.

She’s home now, with a shaved front left arm and wearing a positively demeaning cone collar, but other than that, she seems to feel fine (by the way, she felt completely fine prior to surgery too–she clearly had not begun to feel any of the effects of the cancer by the time we caught it). At this very moment, she is obviously having interesting doggie dreams because she is making her super-cute “whoop-whoop-whoop” noise. She limps a bit whenever the pain medication starts to wear off, but I don’t anticipate that she’ll have a limp after she heals further.

Next steps? We don’t know. I’m not too keen on radiation. It’s expensive, requires frequent vet visits, and does not have as high of a “cure rate” as amputation (also, um, she’s a dog…). Amputation may seem drastic, but it’s less expensive, requires only one initial multiple day, heavily-sedated hospital stay, and prevents recurrence at the initial site (because the initial site is no longer there), thereby reducing the risk of metastasis. At this point, that’s where I think we’re going…but probably no earlier than August.

Oh, and did I mention we close on our house this afternoon? Yeah, it’s been a busy week. The movers come on Monday. Yikes!

• Yet another cutting board that Rebecca simply needed to have (it’s somehow made of paper, or something). We now own seven cutting boards.
• A magnetic knife strip for the new place (we’re leaving the ones we bought several months ago at our rental house, because we’d rather do that than fill in the holes from screwing them into the wall).
• Battery-operated LED lights for inside of our new closets.
• Set of six fairly basic coasters.
• A toaster oven to replace the toaster I bought in April 2005 that for some inexplicable reason now does not work very well.
• A fried-egg sized frying pan (for Melissa).
• Popsicle molds (for Josie–we filled them with beef broth and put chew sticks in them. She loves them!).
• Two brew-in-mug tea cups (and some loose leaf tea).
•  A butter bell (see www.butterbell.com).

I know it probably seems like we went a little bit nuts, but the list of items we didn’t buy but really wanted is even longer! Here’s a sample of the items we restrained ourselves from buying:

• Wine glasses.
• Bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths.
• A ginger grater.
• New placemats and cloth napkins.
• New kitchen towels.
• An Oxo salad spinner (it has a brake).
• An immersion blender (Southern Season was out, or I’m sure we would have bought it).
• A pot clip to hold cooking utensils suspended above the pot.
• A microplane.
• More knives (for Rebecca).
• More All-Clad pans (for Rebecca).
• A cookie sheet or something else metallic that we can hang up and use to store our magnetic spice containers.
• Silicone cupcake pan (or bread loaf pan, or just about anything else baking-related that’s silicone–for Melissa).
• Outdoor recliner (for Melissa).

Oh, and I’m sure there’s more. I think we showed remarkable restraint!

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Yeah, right. A few minutes. Sure, I’ve tried that. For about a half hour. In the past when this has happened, I’ve tried emailing the gmail people once I finally am able to log on, so that I can tell them just how much their product sucks. They sent me a lovely little email that basically said, yep, we were having a problem, but it appears to be fixed now. But let us know if it happens again. Super. So now I imagine I’m supposed to save the gmail customer support email address in my hotmail account so I can email the gmail people from hotmail, because if my gmail isn’t working at the time, that’s really the only way I’m going to be able to contact them, isn’t it?

Rebecca just emailed the gmail customer support people, copying my hotmail account so that they can get in touch with me to rectify the problem. Which begs the question: Why don’t I just migrate my email life back to hotmail and forget gmail ever existed? The bells and whistles of gmail are nice, sure, but only if the basic email functionality actually WORKS. Which it doesn’t right now. So what’s the point?

The bottom line: Can the bells and whistles, gmail, and just develop an email interface that actually does what it’s supposed to do–allow users to log on and send and receive messages.

As it turns out, it wasn’t until Friday afternoon that it was clear we were going to be able to go forward, and as late as Friday morning we were bracing ourselves to walk away from the whole thing if the sellers asked us to make any more concesssions. By then, we’d been through so many ups and downs it’s hard to keep track — finding out that the repairs would only cost $3,500; learning that said repairs would likely cause the inside of the addition to essentially explode; hearing that another contractor had an alternate plan sans explosion, but with a $19,000 price tag; the back and forth with each other as we decided how much we were willing to contribute to the repairs, or whether it was time for us to walk away; waiting two days while the sellers ran out the clock, leaving us minimal time to negotiate if we wanted to keep our inspection appointment; the back and forth with the sellers, as we agreed to pay twice as much for the repairs as we’d offered; and finally, Friday, agreeing to give the sellers pretty much everything they wanted, but taking some of their furniture to save a bit of face, and making peace with the fact that though we were contributing more than we wanted to, we were, at the end of the day, paying a fair price for the house even with the repairs.

So tomorrow, 9 a.m., we inspect. The good news is that the house has already been through one inspection already — the inspection that discovered the structural issues that caused the last sale to fall through. We’ve got a copy of that report, and most of the major things found during that inspection have been fixed. Unless there are any major surprises on the second inspection, we hope that we might actually be able to close before our original July 27 date, and we’re hoping that carrot will incent the sellers, who are already in a new house, to be a little bit more responsive than they were last week. Today it finally seemed safe again to be looking at kitchen cabinets, to be discussing the merits of gas cooktops and Corian sinks, to be talking about which light fixtures Melissa couldn’t stand and was going to have to replace, and to start entertaining the spectacle of transporting our stuff the one block from our current home to our new one.

Here’s the short story: We found a house we really like, that’s the right size, in one of our target neighborhoods, for less than we thought we’d have to spend in that neighborhood. And now we get to call it our own and move into it in a few short months. Scroll to the bottom of this post for pictures.

Here’s the whole story:  In late April/early May (?), Rebecca spied a house right around the corner from us that was up for sale. It looked good from the outside, sounded good from the description, and the price was right! Even though we didn’t yet have a realtor, we tried to call the sellers’ agent to set up a showing. We were very excited. But by the time we heard back from the realtor the next day, it had already been shown seven times, and there was at least one offer and one back-up offer on it. We didn’t even get to see the inside! The house sold even before pictures had been added to the MLS listing.

This spurred us to begin our search, though. We found a realtor, gathered income documentation, and met with a mortgage broker. We were all set. We saw a few houses, but only a few interested us, and none of those worked out. We were about to consider increasing our price range, to see if that opened up any other options for us.

And then, Friday morning, I rolled out of bed and immediately checked my email to see if we’d received an email from the MLS tool our realtor uses to send us new listings that meet our criteria. And there it was–THE house! The one we really really wanted back in late April/early May! I immediately barged into the bedroom and told Rebecca to WAKE UP, because the house on Green was back on the market!

Rebecca emailed our realtor, and called her, and called the realty company’s main line. It turns out our realtor’s son was graduating that day, and she had a conflict of interest on this property anyway,  so she set us up with another realtor to show us the house. At one point I announced to Rebecca that I wasn’t going to go to work until I saw the house. But then Rebecca talked some sense into me–we could see it that afternoon, so I could go to work and then come home after lunch, and we could see it then. I guess we must have made a nuisance of ourselves with our earlier calls, because no sooner had I gotten to work than I got a call from Rebecca saying that the new realtor could show it to us at 10:00. So I turned around. We saw it. We liked it. We met with the realtor later that afternoon to put an offer on it. And the next day (today), we heard back from the realtor a little after 11:00 that our offer was accepted! We’re very excited.

OK, here is a picture of the view of the house from the street:

And here are the inside pictures, starting to the left as soon as you walk in the door, and proceeding counterclockwise through the house (except there should be pictures of the second bedroom after the bathroom pictures, but we don’t have any pictures of the second bedroom):

Living room                        Dining room                     Kitchen

Family room                      Master bedroom

Bathroom shower             Bathroom counter

And here are pictures of the back yard and front porch (we’re getting the rocking chairs!):

We met the realtor at the house today to initial some amended paperwork, and the sellers were there. Also, our friends Molly and Susanne happened to be doing a drive-by of the new place at exactly the same time, so we took them through the house. We were so fortunate to be able to talk with the sellers, and to learn a little bit about the house’s recent history (it was built in 1900, so there’s certainly more that we don’t know). The sellers seemed very nice, and told us that if we were interested in any of the furniture or decorations, we should let them know. They’ll probably just give us some of them, but they’ll name a price for the other stuff. That’s good for them because they don’t have to move it, and good for us because we need furniture that will work in this space!

• Improperly cased nearly every window and door in the house
• Improperly installed the ceramic tile in the hallway, such that when you stood on it, it moved, and the grout was rapidly deteriorating
• Attached more than the allowed number of connections to the 2-1/2″ water supply before putting down new floor, thereby eliminating all access to the plumbing except via a 24″ crawl space
• Been blissfully unaware of major termite damage
• Installed concrete block piers without any mortar
• Overlooked a gap in the roof beams such that anyone who stood over the gap on the roof would fall in
• Neglected to install a shower pan under the master bathroom shower or any waterproofing material behind the slate tiles on the wall of the shower, such that the contractor’s recommendation was to rip it out and start over, and hope that maybe we could salvage the door
• Blindly cut through a load-bearing wall to make room for said shower in the master bathroom

After the fiasco, our realtor gave the seller (who is also the realtor) some feedback, to which she responded by offering to reduce the price by $20,000. Suffice to say we weren’t interested.

It should be said in the midst of all of this that we love our Realtor, Wendy Evans at Prudential Carolinas. We got hooked up with her when we called about another house in the neighborhood a few weeks ago (surprise surprise, it was also under contract, within about 24 hours of being listed). We were planning on taking things slow, having a little sit-down meeting with her, nothing serious. Then one day last week we found ourselves with an appointment to see a house, and we realized we ought to have someone with us who knew what she was doing. I emailed Wendy at 6:30 p.m. on Memorial Day; she called me back half an hour later. When we went to see the house, she was just invaluable, and she’s been incredibly patient and responsive as we figure this whole thing out. It’s a little hard to believe we thought we might navigate this without any help.

So tonight: cute bungalow around the corner from our house, bought in February for $100,000 less than they want for it now, newly refinished attic, fenced back yard. Wednesday: back to the first house we saw, with a contractor to tell us what it would cost to fix everything the not-so-handy owners did wrong (see The Dos and Don’ts of Drywall). But can you say granite countertops? And five-eye gas stove? And convection oven? And Bosch dishwasher? And so many cabinets that our current kitchen would hide its face in shame?