Frankencat
So I was brushing our cat Pandora the other day, and the brush bristles kept getting caught on something on her back: swish-SCRACCCK-swish, swish-SCRAPE-swish,.... I investigated, and after a few minutes of burrowing into her long, lush fur, I discovered a pea-sized, polka-dotted brown nodule attached to her skin. Thinking it was a tick, I got a pincer lock on it with two fingers and carefully tried to pull it off; but an outraged squall and a paw upside my head convinced me it was intrinsic to the cat herself.
Jump forward a few days. Kathy took Pandora to the vet, who took one glance at the unknown growth and declared it had to come off.
Jump forward a few more days, plus one night of cat-fasting (because if you anesthetize a cat with a full stomach, you'll be cleaning the entirety of whichever room she wakes up in). Kathy took Pandora to the vet, and the vorpal blade did indeed go snicker-snack. The nodule went to the pathologist, our vet concerned that it might be an adenoma. And Pandora got home a couple hours early; Kathy retrieved her before she even had to go to work.
Upon returning home I expected to find Pandora almost too drugged out to realize she was in terrible pain. To my astonishment, she greeted me at the door, starved and sassy, oblivous to the huge wound in her back. I took a look at it, almost lost my lunch, steeled myself, and looked again.
Unsurprisingly, they'd shaved her over a patch about the size of a playing card (from a real, professional deck-not one of those crappy-ass gift-shop decks, half of whose cards are irreparably bent after the second shuffle). The bald patch illustrated perfectly how much cat hair, and how little actual cat, we own. (Pandora doesn't look much smaller than the average cat, but only weighs 3.2 kg, or 7 pounds.) Remember that cutaway diagram of the Earth we all saw in school, clearly showing crust, mantle and core? The various layers of Pandora had been similarly exposed. Two fur zones were easily distinguished: the upper layer formed by long, coarse hairs that give the coat its color, and the tangled undergrowth of fine neutral grey hairs that provide insulation and, as a bonus, contrast nicely with either light or dark clothing. And, of course, at basement level was powder-blue cat skin that hadn't seen light since-well, ever. Every time I fly over the Cascades, the mountain range that separates the Puget Sound from the primitive peoples of Eastern Washington, I see vast tracts of National Forest studded with ugly rectangular clear-cut patches. Pandora's back looked exactly like that. It'll take years for all the lost old-growth cat fur to regain its original biodiversity.
Squarely in the center of this cat-hair quarry was the wound itself. The object removed was smaller than a pea, but somehow it had warranted a ragged, 4-cm (1.5-inch) incision. Crude sutures, spaced unevenly around 5 mm apart on average, had been cinched so tight that the skin was beaded up between them. About a centimeter of free thread stuck out on either side of each stitch, forming a V. Overall, it appeared that Pandora had a ghastly, multi-horned caterpillar crawling up her flank.
Must have been amateur hour at the vet's, I mused.
But worst of all, perhaps, was that Pandora, perfectly well and feeling no pain, still wanted to rub up against me with her injured side. The first time I felt that fleshy worm slide along my upper arm, suture-ends tracing parallel white scratches on my skin, I simultaneously screamed and attempted to choke down my rapidly escalating dinner, nearly blowing out both my eardrums in the process.
The good news to come out of this medical misadventure was that the tumor was a completely benign sarcoid. Our vet explained that sarcoids normally only form on horses (this type of growth appears in the WHO's classification of tumors as an equine sarcoid), and offered to discuss with us reasons why our cat might think she's a horse. Far be it from us to impose roles on our cat!
Jump forward a few days. Kathy took Pandora to the vet, who took one glance at the unknown growth and declared it had to come off.
Jump forward a few more days, plus one night of cat-fasting (because if you anesthetize a cat with a full stomach, you'll be cleaning the entirety of whichever room she wakes up in). Kathy took Pandora to the vet, and the vorpal blade did indeed go snicker-snack. The nodule went to the pathologist, our vet concerned that it might be an adenoma. And Pandora got home a couple hours early; Kathy retrieved her before she even had to go to work.
Upon returning home I expected to find Pandora almost too drugged out to realize she was in terrible pain. To my astonishment, she greeted me at the door, starved and sassy, oblivous to the huge wound in her back. I took a look at it, almost lost my lunch, steeled myself, and looked again.
Unsurprisingly, they'd shaved her over a patch about the size of a playing card (from a real, professional deck-not one of those crappy-ass gift-shop decks, half of whose cards are irreparably bent after the second shuffle). The bald patch illustrated perfectly how much cat hair, and how little actual cat, we own. (Pandora doesn't look much smaller than the average cat, but only weighs 3.2 kg, or 7 pounds.) Remember that cutaway diagram of the Earth we all saw in school, clearly showing crust, mantle and core? The various layers of Pandora had been similarly exposed. Two fur zones were easily distinguished: the upper layer formed by long, coarse hairs that give the coat its color, and the tangled undergrowth of fine neutral grey hairs that provide insulation and, as a bonus, contrast nicely with either light or dark clothing. And, of course, at basement level was powder-blue cat skin that hadn't seen light since-well, ever. Every time I fly over the Cascades, the mountain range that separates the Puget Sound from the primitive peoples of Eastern Washington, I see vast tracts of National Forest studded with ugly rectangular clear-cut patches. Pandora's back looked exactly like that. It'll take years for all the lost old-growth cat fur to regain its original biodiversity.
Squarely in the center of this cat-hair quarry was the wound itself. The object removed was smaller than a pea, but somehow it had warranted a ragged, 4-cm (1.5-inch) incision. Crude sutures, spaced unevenly around 5 mm apart on average, had been cinched so tight that the skin was beaded up between them. About a centimeter of free thread stuck out on either side of each stitch, forming a V. Overall, it appeared that Pandora had a ghastly, multi-horned caterpillar crawling up her flank.
Must have been amateur hour at the vet's, I mused.
But worst of all, perhaps, was that Pandora, perfectly well and feeling no pain, still wanted to rub up against me with her injured side. The first time I felt that fleshy worm slide along my upper arm, suture-ends tracing parallel white scratches on my skin, I simultaneously screamed and attempted to choke down my rapidly escalating dinner, nearly blowing out both my eardrums in the process.
The good news to come out of this medical misadventure was that the tumor was a completely benign sarcoid. Our vet explained that sarcoids normally only form on horses (this type of growth appears in the WHO's classification of tumors as an equine sarcoid), and offered to discuss with us reasons why our cat might think she's a horse. Far be it from us to impose roles on our cat!