I spent today in Missoula on the weekly run, driving in with a truck full of dogs — the blind Poodle sisters Molly and Priscilla to the groomers (finally!), and blind Penny and Dexter the Dachshund to our internal medicine specialist, Dr. Dave Bostwick. While the dogs were all being attended to, I did grocery shopping, went to Costco for supplies, took deposits to the bank, interviewed a horse trainer we're going to use to work with blind Cash (more later), and made a few other stops along the way.
Penny needed yet another growth removed from her lower back. Dave thinks it was benign but sent it off for a biopsy to confirm. As for Dexter … well, there turned out to be nothing at all wrong with him, which is why he was probably more indignant than usual about being in a cage.
The other day Alayne felt a lump on his neck under his jaw, and when Dexter turned his head towards the light, she could see it as well. She had me look at him, and I could definitely feel it … and another one on the other side of his neck, too. Swollen lymph nodes … uh oh … was my first thought.
Then I remembered something. When I took blind Callie to WSU for her brain tumor radiation, the 4th year vet student who did Callie's initial pre-intake physical exam felt lumps under her jaw on both sides … and she was concerned that Callie's cancer might have spread to her lymph nodes. The vet student wanted to know if the referring vet — in this case, it was Dave — had mentioned these lumps to us. By the time I got Dave on the phone to ask about them, the oncologist had already walked into the room, felt the lumps, and said, "Oh, those are just very pronounced salivary glands!" Which is exactly what Dave was telling me, between chuckles, on the phone. It was a good learning for both the vet student and me.
So when I dropped Dexter off this morning with Penny, I told Alex, Dave's vet tech, that I was 99% sure these were salivary glands I was feeling on Dexter … but just in case, let's have Dave do an exam and he can have another chuckle at my expense. What made me just a tad bit nervous was the fact that after first feeling the lumps on Dexter, I went around and examined all the other Dachshunds — and not one had lumps like that. Alayne and I thought, hmm, we'd better find out and not make an assumption.
Sure enough, they were salivary glands.
So when I went back to the clinic this afternoon to pick up Penny and Dexter, the wee-one was very vocal about being locked up for no reason at all. And since I didn't move fast enough to get him out, he threw his head back to let rip:
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