Apr 192011
Yesterday I dropped off my faithful travel-mate Spud to the vet. He has a growth on his lip and a few infected teeth. Since he is 18 years old I really wandered if it was a good idea to put him through this. But the growth has been bleeding and I noticed that his teeth were getting pretty bad so at the least the growth had to be taken care of and since they were going to have to put him under, might as well get the teeth taken care of.
Once he was being worked on they found the growth was wider spread then first thought and he had far more tooth infections. After removing the growth they had to do a bit of plastic surgery to reconstruct his lip and ended up pulling 27 teeth. Pretty major stuff for a dog this age to go through.
So far he has been doing well. You can tell he is sore but is eating well (I have to mush up his food) and has been acting as normal as he should considering what he's gone through. He has been a real trooper so far. His mouth should be healed in 3 or 4 weeks and he'll hopefully get back to normal.
I didn't have the growth sent in to be analyzed so we don't know what it was. The vet has real worries that it is cancerous and if it is maybe come back within a month or two. If that happens I'm afraid I'll have to let Spud go in peace as there is no way I would put him through Chemo at his age. Let's hope it doesn't reappear and he can spend a couple more years making trips with me.