The Dirt Field

Dog #2 has cancer. The poor guy cannot catch a break. First, he went blind in one eye in November 2009. Then, at the end of last year, he started to go blind in the other eye and had a few months of regular vet visits and dozens of daily eyedrops and pills, followed by a surgery that ended the ordeal but left him totally blind. He has adjusted well to this, other than the part where he gently ricochets off everything as he navigates the world, but now he’s been dealt another kick in the pants.

The problem seemed minor at first. I took him on a walk to 7-Eleven on Monday and, as I was crossing the street in bright daylight, I noticed the skin under the fur on his tail looked irritated. I bent down for a closer look and was appalled to see the skin was red, mottled with spots, and oozing plasma. You think you’re grossed out reading this? Try standing with that tail outside 7-Eleven knowing that you have to bring that tail back into your house attached to its owner, an owner with a propensity for taking long naps while snuggled into the couch.

To make matters worse, despite efforts to gingerly touch only the fur around the irritation, my hand brushed the skin and came away wet. WET. GAH. My knees went instantly weak and I felt like I was going to vomit right there. As a dog owner, I can handle all sorts of things that would weaken the sturdiest of stomachs. Blood, injuries, poop, whatever. Under duress, I’ve even caught my dog’s crap in my bare hands to avoid letting it touch the carpet at my parents’ house as my father looked on in horror. But skin maladies horrify me. If it oozes, weeps, or seeps, I’m pretty much already barfing.

So I got home and bleached my hand and then it was time to wash the dog. If that tail was going to stay in my house, it was at least going to be cleaned first. I got Scout into the bathtub and started scrubbing and that’s when I felt the lump on his hind leg. It was a struggle not pass out right there, but what was I going to do, not investigate further? It’s not like I was going to open the front door and push the poor guy out for good, so the alternative was to clean clean clean and hopefully address the problem once and for all.

The lump was quickly determined to not be a tick or anything removable. A vet visit was clearly in order.

After making the appointment, I Googled “dog tail irritation” and ended up reading WebMD for dogs (so your pet can be a hypochondriac too!) and, somewhere around slide 3 of a presentation called Skin Problems in Dogs, decided to never eat again ever. In doing this research, I came across something talking about skin tumors and for some reason, I just knew. Not because the evidence added up or my non-existent time in vet school had qualified me to make a diagnosis, but because some little voice just said, yup, that’s going to be it.

And sure enough, the vet came back in after doing a fine needle aspiration of the lump and said, yup, it’s cancer, it’s a mast cell tumor, it’s causing the rash on his tail, and we need to remove it as soon as possible. The tumor, not the tail. Because a lot of crap has happened in my life lately, I didn’t even bother to cry over this news, I just started asking questions and then even managed to thrown down a bad cancer pun about a PET scan. Get it? PET scan? Haaaaaa.

Scout’s surgery to remove the tumor is scheduled for Monday. They’ll do a biopsy, let me know the severity of the tumor and the prognosis, and then I have no idea. I’m not putting the pup through extraordinary measures if the news is bad, not because I don’t love him completely but because he is nearly 10, blind, overweight, sedentary, and apparently short on luck. Quality of life is hard to evaluate because I keep having to lower the bar; he gets excited when I come home and likes kibble, but he’s blind, so it’s not like we play fetch or go running. How do you decide when your pet has probably had enough, when the little things that cause tail wags aren’t enough to balance out the vet visits and the medications and unknown level of discomfort?

Nobody tells you about this part when you get your first dog.