I settled down on the couch, chattering away with the old staffie\’s owner. I\’d been tending to her for a long time now, and had got to know her people pretty well. She came over, gave me a bit of a sniff, then flopped down on the floor with a dismissive grunt – as if to say \”Oh- you again!\” She was grayer than last time I saw her- her whole head was as grey as a badger, and now the tide of age was flowing from her feet, up most of her legs.
\”What\’s up with the old girl then?\” I asked.
\”Well, yesterday we noticed she had a funny little lump on her bottom eyelid – you remember you did the operation where you took one off? – Well this one looks a bit like that, but then it vanished again, and this morning it\’s there again, so we just wanted you to have a look at it,\” she explained.
\”Ok old lady, let\’s have a look at you then,\” I said, as I squatted down on the floor beside her. She rolled a stubborn old eye at me, but let me check her eye, groaning and complaining.
She rolled her stubborn old eye at me, but let me gently open her eyelids. There was a small fleshy lump just poking out of her bottom eyelid on the right-hand side, maybe as big as a match head. I carefully pulled her eyelid down a bit, and could see that it wasn\’t firmly attached. I gently felt it with my thumbnail, when (much to my surprise), it came off, a glistening red little lump sitting on my thumbnail.
\”Look at that!\” I said. \”It\’s just popped off while I was feeling it to see how well it was attached.\”
\”So it has,\” came the happy and surprised reply. \”Do you want a tissue?\”
\”Yes, that would be a help,\” I replied. \”It must have only just been attached by a very narrow neck of tissue. It\’s great news that we won\’t have to consider having an anaesthetic. How is she otherwise?\”
I wiped the little fleshy blob off onto the tissue, as her mum talked to me.
\”She\’s mostly really good, wanting to go for a walk, loves the beach. Some days she\’s a bit slow, but she is fifteen, after all. The tumour still seems to be gone, too, it\’s amazing how the herbs and the cannabis oil have helped with that!\”
I had a feel of her mammary gland, where the large, quickly growing lump was a few months ago. There was nothing to find under my fingers, just the same as at her last visit. I was thinking to myself how this client had sourced her own cannabis oil, (high cbd oil, without the thc content of \’recreational\’ cannabis) because it\’s a bit on the blurry side of things for me as a vet to recommend such things, and how in combination with the special spagyric herbal tincture that a good friend of mine makes, I\’d seen such a miraculous recovery from this cancer. I felt it again and again, just to be sure, but there was only healthy tissue, no sign of the lump. It had taken a couple of months to shrink away to nothing…
\”Yes, I can\’t feel anything there. It\’s lovely to see the old girl looking so well and happy, isn\’t it?\”
\”It sure is,\” came the happy reply from the old dog\’s mum!