I took blind Penny into Missoula today for surgery to remove the cancerous toe we discovered last week. In the photo above, Dr. Dave Bostwick is cutting the bone to remove the toe up to the first joint. Based on the X-rays showing the cancer eating the bone, he thinks that will remove it all. That's good news, because even with the toe missing from the first joint on, she will still have enough of the digit left for weight-bearing. Taking off up to the second joint doesn't leave enough for that.
Here's what her foot looked like after the surgery, with the wound all sewn up:
Dave will send the toe to Colorado State University's veterinary pathology lab to find out what kind of tumor it was. Typically these are melanomas or squamous cell carcinomas (in my earlier post I mistakenly wrote "sarcoma" for that second type of cancer). It will take about 10 days to get the full results back.
Penny came through surgery just fine, and here she is wearing a pretty pink bandage on that foot. When I took this photo she was beginning the process of recovering from anesthesia:
She was in and out of surgery and completely recovered within a few hours, and by early afternoon I had her back at the ranch. On the ride home she kept trying to tear the bandage off, so she is now wearing a cone on her head and is not a happy girl!
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Update on blind Evelyn: Her blood work came back perfectly normal, which was a big relief because we were very afraid she was in chronic renal failure. But her kidney values were perfect. So we are now adding significantly more calories to her diet to see if we can reverse the weight loss, even though we had already adjusted her feeding earlier without much success. Evelyn was filling up pretty quickly on sheer volume of food — we were letting her eat as much as she wanted to get weight on her — but she just may not have been getting the full calorie load her body now wants. Thus we are feeding her for maximum calories. Dave wants to rule out calorie intake as an issue before we take the next diagnostic step, which would mean investigating intestinal malabsorbtion problems.
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