Tumor on the dog, who grows on me
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And now, an update on the adventures of Oggie T. Doggie. Oggie is well on his way to becoming a media darling; also, I've noticed that the only way to make any money in this business is to write about dogs.
Dogs are often far more interesting than people, even if they are also far more likely to get busy with your leg.
(My apologies to the cat people. But I grew up with cats, so I know that you're used to being ignored anyway, right?)
Oggie Doggie is an 8-year-old black Labrador retriever who belongs to my boyfriend and lives in our house. For a couple of years, he'd been growing a gnarled, hairy, irregular and increasingly pendulous blob right in the middle of his chest.
(The dog, not the boyfriend.)
It was a lipoma, and while lipomas are not malignant, they can be aggressive, invasive and very hard to eradicate. They are the stink bugs of the tumor world. Unfortunately, you can't just gather them in toilet paper and flush them away.
No, you have to have them surgically removed with general anesthesia at great expense. Or explain to people why your dog seems to be trying to grow another dog on his own body.
Oggie's lipoma kept getting bigger and heavier. He licked it when he was bored, like when we left the jazz station on all day. He's really more of a WYEP indie folk-rock dog.
Maybe he licked it too much or scraped it on something, because it began to bleed. The house looked like a crime scene. We had to either take Oggie to the vet for surgery or draw a chalk outline on the living room carpet.
We didn't have any chalk.
I spent a nervous afternoon at work, picturing Oggie wearing a little scrub cap over his ears and a tubular oxygen mask over his snout. When I got home, I could hardly believe he was up and walking and wagging his tail and wearing ... a hospital gown?
It had a small blue pattern on it and didn't cover his butt - hospital gown, right? No, some kind of enormous pressure bandage, and you can tell it's for veterinary use because it's printed with little blue paw prints, as if he'd been trampled by tiny painted teacup poodles.
First Published April 21, 2011 12:00 am
