Cancer Diagnosis

I wish I had taken a photo of the lump that turned out to be cancer. I noticed it many months before I showed the vet but didn’t think it was a problem. Lesson #1 – Have the weird stuff checked out as soon as you notice it. I’ve attached a photo of what it looked like just so you know what I’m referring to (swiped from an image search on Google).


I had taken Emmie to the vet to have her severe allergies checked out. I was giving her Benadryl each day and it was no longer helping and she was miserable. Central Texas is a mess with Allergies for people and dogs so we needed some long term relief. During my visit I had them look at the lump on her tummy and they did a test of the cells. They were able to tell immediately that it was cancer and that it should be removed right away. They also explained that when stimulated mast cell tumors release histamine which causes signs of allergies. Good to know, but I was scared and didn’t know what to expect.

I dropped Emmie off the next morning for her surgery. The vet removed her tumor and also checked the cells in her nearby lymph nodes to see if anything had spread. The tumor was graded as Level 1 however the test of her nearby lymph node did show signs of spread and therefore they removed it as well. After learning more, this turns out to be a contradiction. Grade 1 is good (on the cancer scale anyway) and pretty much always means that no spread had occured. The fact that she did show spread seemed to be a test error. I hoped that the error was with the Lymph Node test and not the tumor grade. My vet made the recommendation to talk to a specialist and determine our next steps so I did just that.