It all started off so well. Frank the 7 year old Boxer was booked in for a supposedly straight-forward lump removal. You performed the fine needle biopsy when he was last in and it was clearly a benign lipoma. You’ve booked in another 3 surgeries expecting this one to be the quick and easy one……
Only Frank and his owner, Igor, have other plans for your morning, haven’t they? Igor has discovered a further 9 mysterious swellings that have only JUST appeared in the past week and would like you to quickly whip them off too, seeing as he’s going under anaesthetic anyway, right?
And so begins the “quick” surgery that ends up being endless and running on through everyone’s lunch break….and poor old Frank walks out into reception that afternoon to gasps from bystanders since you’ve left him looking like Aunty Mildred-with-the-cataracts-and-the-chronic-hand-tremor’s patchwork quilt! By pure statistical chance, now that we are talking multiple surgical wounds all at once, he’s highly likely to pop open at least one of these suture lines when Igor decides to spend an hour playing action-frisbee at the park with him on day 2 post-op, so remember not to discard the half-used sterile staple gun….we’ll be needing that. Keep it in a zip-lock bag labelled “Frank” in consult room 2.
Fortunately, unlike the original monstrous patchwork creation in Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, our Frank will be just fine in a couple of weeks, his hair will grow back and nobody will know he’s got a bunch of scars underneath- always an advantage having a body covered in hair! Of course some malignant cutaneous tumours can return or turn up elsewhere further down the line, but like my surgery professor told us back at university: “A chance to cut is a chance to cure” and we vets do really very often “cure cancer” surgically in so many cases, so never leave a lump unchecked and never believe your pet is “too old” for surgery if he’s an otherwise healthy geriatric animal.
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