Our Dog, Our Teacher,
Our Reason

Who Luna was

The shelter told us she was a Parson's Russell Terrier. She was not. A DNA test eventually confirmed what her enormous personality had been hinting at all along: 75% American Staffordshire Terrier, 25% something else — Basset Hound, we think, maybe some Corgi. Whatever the mix, the result was one of the funniest, most clownish creatures we've ever encountered.

Luna took over our lives completely. She had opinions about everything — where she slept, what she ate, when it was time to play, and when we had been on our phones too long. She played fetch until we physically had to stop her. She destroyed every toy with focused enthusiasm. She hid treats in couch cushions and came back for them later like she had a private stash.

She was somewhere around 13–16 years old. With rescues, you often don't know — and the uncertainty becomes part of who they are. She outlived what the books say Staffies usually get. She lived a full, loud, wonderful life.

Left: Luna with the green ball she loved beyond all reason. Right: Her preferred resting position — maximally sprawled, minimally bothered.

The year everything changed

In early 2025, Luna started limping on her left front leg. At first we thought she'd stepped on something — we found a small bump on her paw and treated it the way you would a minor injury: cleaned it, bandaged it, let her rest. She'd seem to improve, and then she'd limp again.

We took her to the vet. She practically stopped limping the moment we walked in — dogs do that. The vet said she seemed fine. A few months later, when the limp was clearly not going away, we went back. X-rays showed nothing alarming. Some arthritis, which we knew about. Nothing in her neck, back, or leg that explained the limp.

That second visit is the moment we replay most. In retrospect, the vet should have looked at the duration — months of intermittent limping in a senior dog — and recognized it as a neurological symptom. They should have recommended an MRI. They didn't.

Daniel and Luna. He wrote most of what's on this site.

What AI found that two vets missed

Over months of tracking Luna's symptoms — writing them down, describing them in detail to ChatGPT, asking follow-up questions — a picture started to emerge. The AI kept pointing toward neurological involvement. It kept asking about neck stiffness, about whether the limp was consistent or variable, about proprioception. It was asking better questions than the vets had.

We didn't fully trust it. That's the honest answer. It felt strange to take an AI's assessment over a licensed veterinarian's. But the AI was right. Luna's final diagnosis — a tumor in her spinal cord canal at her neck — matched almost exactly what the AI had been pointing toward for months.

By the time we had a diagnosis, it was too late to change the outcome. Luna was old. A Staffy's life expectancy is 12–14 years; she had already beaten the odds. But we believe she could have had more comfort, more treatment options, more time — if we had gotten the MRI sooner.

Her last months

When we suspected IVDD — a common spinal condition in dogs — her vet recommended cold laser therapy. We bought a package of twelve treatments and saw real improvement. Enough improvement that we bought a cold laser unit to use at home. The Facebook groups and Reddit threads were full of families doing the same thing, seeing the same results, sharing the same hope. It felt like we were finally doing something right.

Then we met her second neurologist — the one who ordered the MRI. He was the first doctor who gave us a real diagnosis and a real path forward. He also told us something that stopped us cold: cold laser therapy can exacerbate tumors. We had been treating a tumor with a therapy that feeds tumors.

The vet who recommended it didn't know about the tumor. The Facebook groups didn't either. Nobody was being careless or dishonest. But the information gap — between what the communities believed and what Luna actually had — cost us. That's the whole story of this site in one paragraph.

Those same communities — the Facebook groups, the Reddit threads — were also the closest thing to real support we had. People who understood the lack of clarity, the rollercoaster of good days and bad days, the desperate hope when something seems to be working. We don't want to dismiss them. We want to add to them.

After the diagnosis, we looked into radiation therapy to shrink the tumor. A vestibular episode in October looked like a stroke and took weeks to understand. Prednisone reduced her inflammation and made her seem better — while possibly masking how fast things were progressing underneath. Her decline was not linear. There were good days that felt like recovery. Setbacks that came without warning.

She spent her last weeks at home, in her favorite spots. We kept her comfortable. We played the hide-the-treat game until she couldn't anymore. When the time came, we had her euthanized at home — in a spot where she loved to lie down and look out the window.

Luna and Melissa. Those eyes.

Why this site exists

We built WhatYourVetMissed.com because we don't want other families to go through what we went through. Not the uncertainty, not the late diagnosis, not the months of watching a dog suffer while vets shrugged.

The information we needed existed. The research on neurological symptoms in senior dogs. The case for getting an MRI. The understanding that prednisone can mask cancer. The warning about cold laser therapy and tumors. The AI tools that can help you track and connect symptoms over time. Nobody handed it to us — we had to find it ourselves, often too late.

Everything on this site comes from our experience with Luna: what we did right, what we did wrong, what we wish we'd known. We are not vets. We are not medical professionals. We are a family who loved a dog fiercely and learned things the hard way that we would give anything to have known sooner.