Dr. Emerson joins us today with Duke, a 16 year old Newfoundland that was recently diagnosed with Hypothyroidism after large tumors began to form on his foot.
If your pet is showing any similar signs please call the Animal Hospital today to schedule your appointment!
Dr. emerson: good morning, sun risers, i'm dr. karen emerson, and today i have with me my technician, mary parker, and this guy is duke.
He's actually a 16-year- old newfoundland that presented a few months ago.
He's actually been a patient of mine for several years.
We diagnosed him with hypothyroidism a few weeks back, but he presented, his family had went out of town for about a week or two, and they came back, and he had this huge, large tumor swelling on the outside of his foot here on that toe right in here.
And we're actually going to show you pictures of what it looked like.
It was enormous.
He couldn't even walk.
Now, he is 16, so of course we did have some reservations, or they did, about putting him under anesthesia and having him undergo such an extensive procedure.
Before we talked about surgery, we went ahead and did blood work, which was normal, and we went ahead and did what we call a metastasis check.
What that means is i checked internally for any other types of tumors that may help us try to figure out, is this just a tumor here or do we have tumors in multiple places?
Of course, his metastasis check was negative, so we went ahead with surgery.
And him being 16, he did wonderful.
He was under anesthesia a few hours because, like i said, we did have to do an orthopedic surgery where i went in and actually had to amputate most of his foot right here.
We also, in order for us to close this wound, i had to go in and do something called a skin flap, where i actually took skin from up here and rerouted it around to cover this area of his foot so that he would be able to walk and so that it would heal faster.
Duke did wonderful.
This was a few week process.
After surgery, the owners did have to go home and bandage his foot basically daily and keep him from licking it because unlike us, he could not understand that he's not supposed to lick his foot.
But he did wonderful.
The tumor actually turned out to not be cancer, it was a benign growth that he had licked excessively and irritated, so it did have to come off.
But if you have an older dog at home or if you notice an area they are excessively licking, or you notice an area that is growing, don't wait.
Go ahead and bring them in for that consultation so that we can decide if we need to go ahead and take it off before it gets really, really bad.
And i promise, your pets will thank you.
Announcer: wcbi animal health with dr. emerson was brought to you by emerson animal hospital in west point.
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