Pet Insurance & Lymphoma in Dogs

We've been meaning to blog about this for a while, but blogging about a pet that has cancer is never an easy subject to write or talk about.

Just over 6 months ago, one of the dogs received a diagnosis of having canine lymphoma.  Lymphoma is apparently very prevalent in dogs and very deadly.  Thankfully we had pet insurance, more about that later.  We immediately began chemotherapy.

We had 12 weeks of chemotherapy every week, and 12 weeks of chemo therapy every other week.  I must say, the every other week was a lot easier on everyone.  During the weeks of having chemotherapy every week we had to skip treatments which meant it really took us longer than 12 weeks to complete the beginning half of chemo because his white blood cells were regenerating quickly enough and were too low to receive some doses on time.   We also had a very scary ER visit where the little guy was hospitalized for 2 days.

 

IV port during his hospitalization stay at the ER due to a severe drug reaction

I cannot be more grateful that we had invested in Pet Insurance.  We ended up going with Healthy Paws Pet Insurance when we did purchase our pet insurance and I cannot say how easy they were to work with.

They have a phone app where you take a photo of the invoice that you receive from the vet's office and Healthy Paws takes it from there.  It takes a day or two for them to process the claim and about a week after a submitted the claim I received a check in the mail.  Their prices are reasonable, they don't cover exam fees, but not many insurance companies do.  They also do not cover vaccines or other typical care, which is normal.

The biggest plus, other than the phone app, is that you have 1 yearly deductible a year that you must achieve before you start getting money back.  Not one per incident like most of the other companies I looked at (i.e. one deductible for a broken leg, one deductible for a dog bite, another deductible for an obstruction).  With Healthy Paws you get one deductible regardless of how many different problems may arise.

You may not think Pet Insurance is worth it, but accidents happen and one visit to the emergency vet and you are going to hit your deductible in one visit most likely.  By our first vet visit, which included the biopsy we had already hit our deductible for the year.  The insurance from Healthy Paws has more than paid for itself.

I seriously encourage and urge you to look into pet insurance.  Lymphoma is so prevalent in dogs, I cannot tell you how many dogs I met with Lymphoma during our vet visits.

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