Problem is, is a bleeding lump a really good reason? He was not a patient that I really wanted to knock out for surgery without a really good reason. He seemed pretty miserable and the owners were already grappling with quality-of and end-of-life issues.
This geriatric dog also had the requisite litany of old guy ailments – he had a heart murmur, arthritis, borderline kidneys, failing eyesight and (for all I knew) fallen arches. The owners had that What the hell just happened? – he was fine an hour ago! look that we see all the time in the ER. His distraught owners rushed him in to me in the ER one night because he had discovered his large lump and chewed it until it started to bleed, and on his snowy white coat just a little bit of blood smeared around made him look like an extra from Saw. I remember one little dog, a geriatric poodle who was forty hundred years old if he was a day (toy poodles seem overly prone to having some icky skin things and tend to do a lap-dance on their dermis – that’s skin get your mind out of the gutter). One day, the little bump, that little lump that used to be so little – remember? – reaches some indefinable critical mass, puberty or something, and the dog is like, Hey? What are you doing there? I think I’ll bite/scratch/otherwise annoy you until you bleed/itch/get infected and make a mess all over the house.Īdd to this that the span of time from little bump to holy crap it’s bleeding! can be years and now you’re most likely dealing with an aged pet with attendant risks of anesthesia and surgery, and the problem starts to take form. Usually the first one to notice that it’s come out of hiding is the dog. And it grows, little by little, day by day. It slips into the flow of quotidian life and goes unnoticed. It becomes a part of daily, disorganized life like the cobwebs in the corner of the living room ceiling, the dust bunnies under the fridge grill, or the chalky white stuff that collects behind the faucets in your bathroom (go check – it’s there). So what happens? The little, forgotten I-found-it-while-petting-him bump grows under the radar. But when I first got out, I ran into a spate of these cases and I was totally unprepared for the level of anguish and drama that a wee little verrucous growth could cause. In vet school, they don’t have classes on Monster “Warts” 101, or Dealing With Giant Infected Smelly Bleeding Skin Tags That Could Have Been Taken Off Five Years Ago For $90. It’s a case of a stitch in time saves Fido.
So taking care of them when they’re small and your dog is young just might be the right thing to do. Most of them are benign and don’t present a threat to the dog’s life in and of themselves by that I mean they won’t spread or become malignant.īut these seemingly innocuous little growths can become a big enough problem over time that pet owners and vets are faced with some tough decisions sometimes life does hang in the balance. Most folks think they’re hardly worth a trip to the vet, and they’re likely to be forgotten at the next trip to the vet, so they don’t get mentioned or examined – when they’re little. They usually start in mid-life with a little giblet that you might run across while petting your pet. (No pictures in the comments section, please.) You’ve all seen little skin tags, lobules and growths on dogs – maybe even on yourself.
(I’m not all that worried about that last one, since I plan to be a vast interstellar cloud of sentient xenon and living a vibrant fantasy life entirely within my own gassy reality by that point.)īut, in any case, if left alone things get disorganized and worse off. And, as I just found out, the universe itself will cool down and cease to exist in about 100 billion years’ time. Little problems become big ones, pairs of socks become singletons, rocks become gravel, mountains wear down. There’s a fundamental law of the universe that things become more disorganized over time.
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