NATERNET

It is a Tumor

So, there’s not going to be a picture of the day from Thursday. I know that you’re all let down and disappointed in me. I apologize. 

My day yesterday took a turn for the worse when Sara called me up out of the blue during my lunch to tell me that our oldest dog, Marley, has a tumor the size of a golf ball on her front right leg. We’ve had this scare before with Marley. A few years back, we found a lump on her back. We took her into the vet, they checked it out and determined that it was nothing more than a fatty lump. If it got bigger, we should be worried, but it hasn’t, so nothing really came of it.

This was different. First off, we have no idea how long it has been there. Since Marley is a Puli and is covered in piles of corded fur, it’s rare that we ever see her skin, discern where her limbs are or sometimes know which end is which. We haven’t noticed it before our friend, Zach, found it while petting her yesterday, but it could have been there for weeks or months or it could have popped up within the past couple of days. Not knowing is hell.

I met Sara and Marley at the vet yesterday afternoon. The vet checked her vitals, asked us some questions about her eating habits and whether she was acting differently or had been having trouble peeing or pooping. She has been the same old Marley, with no problems aside from occasionally having a snotty attitude, so that was encouraging. They took her into the back and extracted a sample from the tumor, but have to send the sample off to get tested at a lab before they know exactly what it is; whether it’s cancerous or just one of the many benign tumors that older dogs develop over time (Marley’s eight years old).

So, most of my day yesterday was spent worrying about my dog and, depending on when the test results come back from the lab, I’ll be spending today or tomorrow doing much of the same. 

We got Marley a few months after we got married. We had just moved out to Portland, were living in a small one-bedroom apartment and were both stressed and lonely and full of uncertainty. She became our one little touchstone of sanity in those early months of our marriage and our jump out to the west coast, away from family and friends. I don’t want to say that she saved our nacent marriage, because that would be hyperbole, but she definitely helped bind us together. 

This golf-ball sized tumor just serves as an unwelcome reminder that a pet that has been such a big part of our lives for the past eight years isn’t going to be around forever, and that really sucks. It’s something that we both, of course, knew in the back of our heads, but seeing it writ large in front of our eyes is a bit of a shock to the system. 

That said, I’m very optimistic that she’s going to be just fine. Like I said, she’s had fatty lumps before. We’ve talked to other friends who have had dogs and they have run into much the same issues as their pets got older and in most of the cases, the tumor was just a benign lump and the dog was fine. I hope that’s the case with Marley.