Super Bowl ad dog gets advanced radiation therapy at animal cancer hospital
Bessie, a 2 year old Chihuahua mix, was unable to walk on her own and after a few tests by the Neurology team at the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, they found a rare tumor on her spinal cord, a nephroblastoma. With Compassionate Care funds, Bessie was able to have the tumor removed and is walking again. Photo by Madison Brown for Virginia Tech.
Cody was a star long before his first birthday, and he carries himself like one a dozen years later.
The fox red Labrador retriever, who once played a heart-swooning role with Clydesdale horses and littermate co-stars in a Budweiser television ad “Puppy Love” that aired during Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014, warmly greeted all who acknowledged him in the lobby of the Animal Cancer Care and Research Center in Roanoke while still projecting a calm and steady air of reserve.
Diana Kightlinger, who lives in Nelson County, sought out the cancer center — one of three teaching hospitals of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine — after Cody was diagnosed with nasal adenocarcinoma earlier this year. Left untreated, the cancer can take a dog’s life in less than a year.
“He's always been super healthy,” Kightlinger said. “But starting in January, he'd wake up in the middle of the night and sneeze so violently that I would wake up because, despite Cody not being allowed on the bed, guess where he sleeps?”
Three doses of focused radiation
At first, she suspected Cody had allergies. But more diligent vacuuming and washing of bedding didn’t seem to help. Neither did switching laundry detergents and allergy medication.
Cody started dripping mucus out of one nostril that became tinged with blood. Antibiotics prescribed by a veterinarian only improved his symptoms temporarily.
Finally, a CT scan, rhinoscopy, and biopsy performed at Virginia Veterinary Specialty and Emergency in Charlottesville found Cody had cancer inside his nose.
Kightlinger brought Cody in late April to the animal cancer hospital in Roanoke for three consecutive days of focused radiation treatment, guided by radiation oncologist Beatrix Manning, chief medical officer of the center, with the facility’s $3.28 million linear accelerator.
“The best treatment currently available for nasal tumors is stereotactic radiation therapy, a highly focused form of radiation that is precisely planned and accurately delivered,” said Manning, clinical assistant professor of radiation oncology at the veterinary college. “This approach allows us to spare the surrounding normal tissues while delivering an effective dose to the tumor, minimizing clinically significant side effects.
“Treatment is completed over just three consecutive days,” Manning said, “making it especially convenient for families traveling long distances and for older dogs, where reducing the number of anesthetic events is beneficial. This was certainly true in Cody’s case. Our goal is always to keep pets at home with their families whenever possible, rather than requiring them to spend days or weeks hospitalized for more conventional radiation treatments.”
The relative brevity of the treatment schedule and the highly focused nature of the radiation gave Kightlinger great relief.
“I thought radiation therapy meant 20 treatments over weeks, and I didn't want to put Cody through that,” Kightlinger said. “I mean, he's 12 1/2. Still, I always figured he'd live to 14 or 15, and I wasn't ready to say goodbye to him yet. But then I read up on stereotactic radiation therapy and realized it would be one to three treatments and not painful.”
Dogs undergo general anesthesia for the treatments; opioids are seldom used, and weren’t in Cody’s case. “Cody wasn’t as disoriented or as tired as he could have been,” Kightlinger said.
“We came Wednesday morning for his first treatment and this was his last one,” Kightlinger said May 1.
A star is born
Kightlinger was not seeking a television star when she contacted an Oregon breeder while still living in Montana. She wanted a 2.0 version of her late canine sidekick, Jake, also a fox red lab.
“I was the center of Jake’s universe,” Kightlinger said. “Cody loves me, but I’m not the center of his universe. Every dog is unique.”
After Kightlinger had arranged to acquire Cody in late 2013, the breeder contacted her to tell her that Cody and his seven littermates had been asked to appear in a television commercial.
“I said, ‘I don’t want my puppy to be in a commercial,’” Kightlinger said. “He's going to be my Christmas puppy. The breeder said, ‘Well, it's a Super Bowl commercial.’ I still wasn’t sure about it. Then she said it's for Budweiser and the Clydesdales are going to be in it. At about that point, I'm thinking, OK, this is really big time.' It's not only the Super Bowl, but it's the kind of Super Bowl commercial everybody loves, that I love.”
The puppies and their mother who was still nursing them were transported from Oregon to Thousand Oaks, California, where the commercial was being shot as they reached 10 weeks of age.
“When you see the commercial, it's supposed to look like it's the same puppy in all the roles,” Kightlinger said. “Of course, it's not. There were eight puppies. Each puppy was in the commercial, but they all played different parts. One puppy learned to dig under fences. Luna and Cody both learned to do the scene where the puppy is kissing the horse. Luna was much smaller, so she’s the one that's actually in the commercial doing it. It’s just so cute.”
Cody was not given the commercial’s most iconic image, but he still had a memorable scene.
“Cody does a sad expression that has no parallel,” Kightlinger said. “I've never seen a dog so able to get you to do whatever he wants because he looks so despondent. So when the rancher is carrying the puppy out of the barn to get it away from the Clydesdale, that's Cody.
“I like to say it's because he was the cutest, but he was a puppy. There are seven other puppies, and all of them are pretty adorable too.”
A new move to Virginia
As Cody was making his mark in Hollywood, Kightlinger’s world was already being shaken by cancer.
“It turned out the Christmas that I wanted Cody to come home to be my Christmas puppy, my father was diagnosed with bile duct cancer,” Kightlinger said. “So I wouldn't have been home for Christmas anyway.”
Kightlinger traveled to Virginia to spend time with her father who received radiation therapy for his cancer. It turned out to be her father’s last Christmas – he died eight months later.
Years later, as the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, her mother developed dementia, requiring Kightlinger to travel to Virginia frequently while leaving Cody in Montana.
“He had a great life in Montana,” Kightlinger said. “He had family style pet sitters. All the dogs were together in the living room, hanging out, and they had five acres outside that were fenced. He loved being with them.”
Tiring of the travel back and forth, Kightlinger finally moved to a mountaintop condo in Virginia. Her mother died only nine days after she and Cody moved there. Her nearest family was her sister and brother-in-law three hours away in Suffolk.
“I'm an introvert. I'm fine hanging out by myself,” said Kightlinger, who works as a freelance writer. “But Cody loves his dogs and loves his people.”
A post on Cody’s behalf on the Wintergreen homeowners Facebook page garnered 50 responses and led to the start of DOG (dog owners group) at Wintergreen that has grown to over 500 dogs and regularly schedules walks and events. The group holds a fundraiser for the Nelson County SPCA/Almost Home in December and raised over $6,000 this past year.
“We've both made a lot of good friends through Wintergreen DOG,” Kightlinger said. “And Cody’s not lonely anymore.”
Still some road to travel
As with almost any cancer patient, person, dog, or otherwise, the journey is not over with one set of treatments.
Monitoring for a resurgence of cancer will continue, but Manning said Cody’s prognosis is relatively optimistic.
“We expect the tumor to gradually shrink over time,” Manning said. “Clinical signs such as nose bleeds typically resolve within the first couple of weeks, allowing patients to breathe more comfortably as the effects of radiation take hold and the tumor continues to regress. In approximately four to six months, we will perform a follow-up CT scan to evaluate the response to treatment. By that time, we expect the tumor to be 80 to 90 percent smaller, and in some cases it may no longer be visible on imaging.”
Four weeks after the radiation treatment, Kightlinger said that Cody seems to be as strong and healthy as he was before the cancer diagnosis.
Manning said studies have shown that approximately half of dogs treated with stereotactic radiation therapy for nasal tumors like Cody’s remain disease-free 16 months after treatment.
Should Cody fall into that category, he would be nearing the upper range of life expectancy for his breed.
It has been and continues to be a life well lived, and much loved, more than a decade after his starry eyed puppyhood.
“He's a very, very sweet and calm dog, and always has been,” Kightlinger said. “It's been fun seeing the more rambunctious dogs come in here, but he's mellow. … Having a dog with a personality like that has been a blessing, truly. He makes life happy, and people love him.”
