Cancer Diagnosis and Surgery

Lumps are common in our pets, especially senior pets. Some our benign (not likely to spread) and others our malignant (will spread or invade surrounding tissue).

How do we decide which lumps are nasty and which we can leave?

Diagnosis

At Vet Med our Vets are trained in cytology (study of cells). This allows Vet Med vets to take a fine needle sample of the lump and determine what cells are in the lump.
This is a very simple and almost painless technique. A needle the same size that your pet gets with their vaccine is inserted into the lump and a syringe is attached and cells are sucked out and sprayed onto a glass microscope slide.

The slide with cells are then stained with a special stain called modified wright stain and examined under the microscope to determine whether the lump is inflammation or a cancer. If the cells are cancerous then sometimes our Vet Med Vets can determine if the cells are round cell vs epithelial cells vs spindle cells. Our Vets can sometimes even diagnosis the exact type of cancer such as mast cell tumour, histocytoma, lymphoma or a spindle cell tumour.

The cell type is important as it will help Vet Med Vets to determine what surgery and how much tissue needs to be removed to treat the cancer lump.

Treatment - Surgery

VetMed Vets are very experienced in cancer surgery. It is important to remove the cancerous lump in the first surgery if possible. This sometimes requires large amount of cancerous and normal tissue to be removed. This sometimes requires our Vet Med Vets to use special skin flaps or grafts to close the area where the cancerous lump has been
removed.

Our pets are very lucky in that we can move large amounts of skin with its blood supply attached to close large areas where cancerous lumps have been removed. This is different in humans where the under lying muscle needs to removed with the skin, which makes the surgery a lot more invasive.

Sometimes the cancerous lump has spread to the local lymph gland or other organs or the surgery didn’t remove all the cancerous cells. When this occurs your pet requires chemotherapy to try and slow the growth of these cells.

Treatment - Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is very different in pets compared with people. In our pets the aim is to maintain a good quality of life as long as possible. During the time pets are receiving chemotherapy we may give your pet tablets to prevent nausea or antibiotics to prevent infections.
Your pet will require regular blood tests to monitor red and white cell blood counts and possibly liver and kidney levels to make sure the treatment is working and the correct dose is given.
On the whole our pets on chemotherapy have an extended life that is enjoyable for both the pet and you the owner.