Penny Update

So, we took the Pennster to Louisville on Tuesday fully anticipating having a pretty radical surgery done. We never realistically thought that we'd be bringing her home an hour and a half after arriving.

The vet was optimistic about our observation that the lump seemed smaller than it used to be. "Cancer doesn't usually get smaller," said he. He wouldn't have performed the full-out surgery even if we begged (he did describe it to us, though, and I'm not sure I'd want to put her through that even if it would save her life...I don't know. It's pretty major.) What he recommended was to remove the lump conservatively as a biopsy and have the tissue analyzed as a whole.

He said that sometimes scar tissue can look like sarcoma cells in a fine needle aspirate (which is what we had done) because they're out of context and it's such a small sample, I guess. Like when your gums get all sore and raw because of an aggressive teeth cleaning -- if you took a cell sample, they might look like squamous cell (?) cancer (I think that's what he said) but of course, you don't have cancer, it's just pissed off tissue.... He speculated that maybe she got injured by Arthur (i.e. he bit her in a bout of rough Kitty Olympics) or maybe even a needle stick from her shots got infected without us knowing it and now it's formed scar tissue.

We're crossing our fingers that he's right. Our new plan is to keep feeling the lump to see what it's doing and if it keeps getting smaller, it probably isn't cancer and it might go away altogether. If it gets bigger or stays the same and we are still nervous about it, we can have it biopsied at our local vet's office for considerably less than what he would charge in Louisville. He would have charged $1000-$1200 and our vet could do it (albeit not quite as expert a job) for less than $500.

So keep those good vibes headed Penny's way. I think it has been helping!