Monday - Saturday 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. | Closed Sunday
Monday - Saturday 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Closed Sunday
Call (719) 219-8569
Call (719) 219-8569
Finding a lump on your pet’s skin can be worrisome. How do you know if it is something bad? What should you do about it? There is a very long list of things that cause lumps on skin. Some of them are innocuous some are very serious. Here are some of the more common types of benign lumps that I see on pets, and the ways we identify and treat them. Next time we will talk about some of the more common problematic lumps.
Sixteen minutes. That was all the time it took give relief to a dog who had been suffering with bladder pain for very likely a year or more. Mandy is a sweet, mini schnauzer who had been surrendered to Dreampower Animal Rescue for a variety of reasons, but a few minutes in the exam room made it clear that the main reason was probably because she was urinating all over everything. She couldn’t go for more than a few minutes without squatting and straining to produce a few drops of very bloody urine. As soon as I palpated her bladder I could feel a stone inside. An x-ray confirmed that there was a stone just slightly smaller than a chicken egg with sharp spikes projecting from its edges. I would have taken quite a long time for a stone of this size to develop, and during that entire time it would be like having a medieval torture device scraping the lining of her bladder. Surgical removal of the stone took only sixteen minutes and provided an instant cure. Now Mandy can carry on without constant pain and without urinating uncontrollably all over the place.
When your dog sits by your chair panting in anticipation of any morsel that might make its way to the dog zone, do you sometimes lose the urge to finish the rest of your meal due to the pungent wafting of his dog breath in your direction? When your cat jumps onto the table to stand on the newspaper because you are trying to read it, do your eyes start to water from the vapors that are emitted from her mouth as she starts to groom herself? I suspect that more owners than not have had up close and personal experiences with dental disease in their pets.
Izzy the kitten came in as an emergency with her owner and the owner’s five year old daughter Clarissa. They had gotten the kitten last month and the girl was so enamored of the little cat that she wanted to pick her up and haul her around everywhere. Clarissa’s parents could see that having a small, somewhat uncoordinated child haul the kitten around in her arms was likely to lead to trouble, so they had made the rule that Clarissa is only to pet and play with the kitten when she is sitting down and she was not to carry the kitten in her arms and walk around. Clarissa had tried to follow the rules, but the temptation was just a little too much at one point, and as she was struggling to hoist a wiggling Izzy and walk up the stairs at the same time she had gotten her feet tangled up and had fallen down on the cat and broken Izzy’s font leg just below the elbow.
The couple in front of me stared with open disbelief and a hint of hostility. I had just told them that the Golden Retriever puppy they had just purchased from the back of a pickup truck along Woodmen road was cryptorchid, meaning that one of his testicles had not descended correctly and was hung up either inside his abdomen or trapped under the skin in his groin. This genetic problem meant that this dog absolutely had to be neutered to prevent the development of cancer in his undecided testicle, and that it was completely unacceptable to use him as a breeder, in spite of the fact that he would still be physically capable of siring puppies, because he would pass the genetic tendency to be cryptorchid on to his male offspring. I hadn’t even gotten to the part where I explained that because his lower jaw was a full inch shorter than his upper jaw, his lower canines were going to contact the roof of his mouth and potentially cause problems there too.