Sylvester loses his lumps

We had to starve Sylvester last night from 10pm and for a boy who likes his tuck, this was not welcome.  Plus there was no breakfast and that was completely beyond the pale and totally unacceptable.  He kept rushing off to the kitchen in front of us every time we set foot in that direction and then sat he sat forlornly staring at his bowls, wondering why they were stubbornly refusing to fill up with food.

At 8.30am this morning we deposited him at the vets, filled in the forms and were told to ring at 2pm to see how he was.  I asked if they would also trim his claws and check out some weird looking black spots under his chin while they were at it.

TLH and I then went home and milled around listlessly all morning, not quite knowing what to do with ourselves apart from watching the clock.  I'd already decided that they were going to find all manner of things wrong with him - his kidneys were going to be packing up, his liver had shrivelled to the size of a raisin, the blackness under his chin was obviously going to be cancerous growths - and they were going to call us in and advise us that he was so raddled with disease that it would be a kindness not to let him come round from the anaesthetic.

At 2pm I girded my loins and rang them.  "Oh, he's fine!" the lovely male nurse trilled, "a bit wobbly still from the anaesthetic so it's probably best to leave it until 4pm to come and collect him".  TLH and I started breathing again but I was still expecting there to be something negative to report when we collected him, so I wasn't going to start to relax just yet.

On the dot of 4pm we walked through the door and saw Jane, the vet, immediately.  She said it had been a fairly standard cyst but it could be sent to the pathology lab if we wanted; we decided that would probably be unnecessary as it wasn't abnormal looking.  She confirmed that all his blood work was absolutely fine, which surprised me no end.  She said she'd sutured the wound using internal stitches and it had come together beautifully, except for one external stitch at the top.

He was then brought through in his basket, all wide-eyed and bewildered, and silent.  We could see that the entire back of his head had been shaved and a big stitched incision of about 4cms in length.  It may not sound much but it's almost the length of the back of his head!  Poor lovey! Jane, the vet, said that he'd also got acne on his chin and what we'd seen were great big blackheads which she'd squeezed out for him (ewwwww).  She'd shaved his chin on both sides to access the acne leaving him with a little Van Dyke pointy beard of hair on the end of his chin.  This is both funny and sad at the same time, but also reassuring that it didn't turn out to be nasty cancerous lumps - acne we can deal with, sarcoma is something else...

The lovely male nurse said that Sylvester had refused food in the vets when offered it but they expected that he'd eat when we got him home - and so it came to pass.  We got him home, let him out of the basket and he made a beeline straight for his food bowl and shoved as much food down his neck as quickly as he could, then took himself upstairs for a lie down in the bath!

He looks as if he's had a reverse lobotomy, and we're telling people that we've had extra brains put in.  It all looks very drastic but the cyst had to come out so there was no way of avoiding it really.  It's going to take months for the fur to grow back, and it looks like he's had half his head taken away - it's so weird.  We have to take him back again on Friday just to check that everything's healing up nicely but hopefully that should be it now for visits to the vet.

I'll leave you with some photos to twang your heartstrings: