Should I Worry About a Lump?

One of the more common things we see pets for are lumps and bumps. It is almost always a stressful visit, as people often worry that the lump may be cancerous.

It is a bit of an irony that people often don't bring their pet in because they are worried that their pet has cancer. For far too long the vet profession has approached cancer as a "sorry, your pet has cancer. There's nothing we can do" disease. That has all changed now, but the single most important thing that determines what we can do is how soon we see the case.

There is nothing more upsetting than seeing someones pet with cancer and being unabe to help it when we know if we had seen it sooner we could have treated it successfully.

When you bring a pet in to see us with a lump, we will normally ask a few questions about when it was first noticed, how fast has it grown, etc. This gives us an idea as to how aggressive the lump may be.

Depending on the nature of the lump, we may take a sample with a needle in the consult room and examine it under the microscope. This will often tell us if the lump is inflammatory or if it may be a cancerous lump.

For most cancerous lumps, we need to do further test to determine if it is a benign tumour (the "good" kind, which do not tend to spread), or if it is malignant (the "bad" kind, which may spread and invade surrounding tissues). This further testing may be in the form of a biopsy, where we remove a small part of the lump and send it to the lab for analysis, or an excisional biopsy, where we remove the whole lump and send it off to the lab. Which technique we use will depend on the location of the lump, and what we have found on the needle sample.

The vast majority of lumps we see can be cured surgically if we see them soon enough. Even the more aggressive tumours can be fully removed if they are operated on while small. In the last few months we have also been able to use daily or 3 times weekly medication to stop aggressive cancers regrowing once they have been partially removed, allowing us to successfuly treat aggressive cancers on legs and heads without the need for radical surgery or amputation.

If you find a lump on your pet, please book it in to be seen as soon as possible. Most lumps are actually benign, so we can put your mind at ease with some simple tests. In other cases where the lump is malignant, early diagnosis may allow us to cure your pet. There is almost no cases where a vet properly trained in treating cancer cannot make a significant difference to the quality and length of your pets life.