Reese’s bummer of a bum
Poor Reese had to have an operation last Thursday. He had grown a growth right by his poop hole (okay, rectum, if you insist on being linguistically accurate) and it kept growing. I finally remembered to do some Internet research and concluded it must be an impacted (clogged) anal gland. So I gloved up and tried to express (squeeze) it. No luck, which was both good and bad, since anal gland secretions are STINKY! So off to the vet we went (me as driver and financer, Reese as patient, Anne as moral support).
The vet said that nope, it wasn’t an impacted anal gland. In fact, his were healthily empty (which explains why nothing came out when I squeezed). Instead, the growth was a tumor of some sort and probably a kind tht is not exactly common, but not uncommon either. So we scheduled his surgery and I started worrying a bit.
Thursday morning, Anne and I dropped Reese off at the vet. (I swear my sniffling was due to a nasty cold, not an oversentimental farewell to my baby boy.) I called and checked at lunchtime and they reported that Reese was doing well and they were almost done. I was able to pick him up at 4:30 that same afternoon, as expected.
The poor guy now not only had stitches right by his poop hole, but they had shaved him! That has actually been the worst part, as anybody who has indelicately shaved can attest. They sent a biopsy off to a lab, and the results came back negative for cancer with a “favorable” prognosis. I caught it early, before the tumor interfered with his anal glands or his rectum, and the vet got it all out, so all is well. It might come back, but that, too, would be normal and we’d just have to repeat the process. So that’s good.
As for healing, I declined to put a cone/e-collar on Reese, resorting instead to simply telling him to leave his bum alone. He tried his very best, but by Sunday he had broken a couple of the stitches. So I squirted Neosporin into the gap and this morning took Reese back to the vet. Fortunately, she said that the important stitches were further inside and wouldn’t break. Unfortunately, she said that he needed to stop irritating everything by licking and I needed to get the collar, after all. So I did. And oh, is he funny! He keeps bumping into walls, has no peripheral vision, can’t chew on his rawhide bones… Poor guy, but so funny!
This is just one more humiliations in a week of humiliations. First all these women keep lifting his tail and looking at his butt, then his mom (me) takes a picture of his shaved parts and sends it to his grandparents, and now he not only has to wear this stupid collar (at least it’s blue) but his mom keeps laughing every time he bumps into a wall! Poop puppy is definitely having a bummer of a week.
But at least he can still drink out of the toilet.
