The last time I posted, it was about one our dogs.

Ume, our adopted female Rott, had recently gone into surgery. A few people asked about how things were going and because of that (and also because I think our experience was an interesting one), I thought I’d explain what happened.

So, a few weeks ago we found a lump on Ume’s leg. Actually, we found two. We took her to one vet whose diagnosis failed to inspire me with any real confidence so the following day, we took her to another vet (Companion Animal Surgery in Singapore). They were extremely concerned given that these large lumps had appeared in simultaneous locations – and offered the grave suggestion that it might be metastizing mast cell cancer. They recommended surgery to remove the lump the following week. When it comes to vets I usually try to be as educated as possible going in (and also when I get back home after seeing them). This is not to perform my own diagnosis (I’m of the opinion a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing), but more to know the right questions to ask. Anyway, Dr Steve Johnson, who we saw at CAS was able to answer all my questions patiently and competently – never reaching for false conclusions or building false hope. His compassionate yet matter of fact way of presenting the options (and suggesting his own recommendation) was good enough for me to think that we’d come to the right place and agreed for the operation.

Anyway, the operation day came around with plenty of worrying and after checking Ume in, later that afternoon I got a call that when examining Ume under GA, Dr Johnson had found a much larger (and more worrying lump) inside her abdomen. This was considered to be urgent and so the one(s) on her leg got deprioritised. I was warned to expect the worst kind of news as the evidence was not starting to mount significantly against our girl as it now looked like the lumps on her leg could actually have been secondaries and that the real problem lay inside. I gave the go ahead to go in after the one inside and insisted that whatever they found, they were not to euthanize her on the table.

Anyway, after a worrying few hours I got the call that the surgery went well. They did find a very large (grapefruit sized) lump on her spleen and had to remove the entire organ. So the growth then went to the pathologists with our deepest hopes being that they would declare it as a benign tumour. I’ve never experienced that kind of wait before – v stressful obviously. This was made worse by the fact that spleen cancers (hemangiosarcoma) are known to be extremely aggressive, and by the time you find them it’s often too late for treatment. Chemo is listed as a potential option – but has all the downsides and is not a particularly effective treatment for spleen cancer, causes its own side effects, etc. Dogs are often given only 2 – 4 months to live after the discovery of hemangiosarcoma. Anyway, those few days went by painfully slowly but the pathologist report came back as "nodular hyperplasia" which basically means she had an enlarged *benign* growth of the spleen. This condition can be very dangerous – but not if you catch it before it ruptures – and as her spleen has now already been removed, this was fantastic news. Indescribable relief.

Even better – since then, the two growths on her leg (which are what we originally took her in for) started to decrease noticeably in mass the few days following the operation and now, two or so weeks later, they are completely gone. Seeing this happen at the same time is strongly suggestive that these are not a different, unrelated cancer problem. We still have to keep an eye on things but it’s looking about as hopeful as we could have ever wished for so far. Our thanks to Dr Steve Johnson at Companion Animal Surgery for finding this in the first place and then bringing her through the surgery successfully is pretty much limitless. Looking back, the strange twist of this story may end up being that if it weren’t for the growths on her leg, we would probably never have discovered the growth in her abdomen until it was too late… Fate is not without a sense of irony it seems. As for the four of us, we couldn’t be happier.