4th vet visit for toe & 1st vet visit for lump
January 27th, 2012 § 4 Comments
Back to the vet again today (becoming regulars there, now).
Grey’s wound has ‘done so well’ apparently. Yay! Congratulations to Grey’s wound! I was strangely proud of my fast-healing dog. (Despite all the many accounts of health issues with SRHPs, Grey has always been absurdly healthy.)
Yet, even so, the vet doesn’t want her to run off lead until MONDAY. ARG. I know it’s only 3 more days, but we are now on Day 10 of USRHPH. (Unexercised Slovakian Rough Haired Pointer Hell.) Still, what’s another 2 days? He then added that ideally it shouldn’t get wet, even then. So if it’s raining on Monday, we are supposed to wait another day! What?! And what if it’s raining THEN? Poor Grey has probably concluded she will never run off lead again, by now. (I think I will double-bag it in the waterproof bootie, if it’s raining!).
He also had a look at Slate’s lump, but he can’t tell much from looking. Here it is, if you want to not-tell-much-by-looking, too. This is towards her rear end, in line with her nipples:
He wants to do a Fine Needle Aspiration on it, as we did on the others a few years back. I told him about the slightly yellow tinge to her poo and the very yellow cow-pat poos on finishing the metronidazole, and the (once) refusal of food – and we weighed her and found that she’d lost a couple of kgs in weight. Not a great amount, and I think she had been slightly podgy the last time she was weighed. But still… So we’re also going to run some bloods to check her liver function.
But, if he took the tests today, the samples would sit in the post over the weekend and not get processed till Monday. So he wants us to go back on Monday morning and do them then.
Because of the stupid way insurance works, if the FNA comes back telling us this is a follicular cyst, we’re not covered. Since follicular cysts are now excluded from the policy as she’s had them before. We wouldn’t do any further treatment, if it were a follicular cyst, but we’d have to pay for the FNA ourselves.
On the other hand, if the FNA comes back as a mast cell tumour, then we’re covered because we haven’t had one of these before.
Despite this, you can very much guess which we’d rather it would be…
Good luck Jo with your test results for Slate
Thanks Pippa.
Thinking good thoughts for Slate. I had no idea insurance worked like that. I knew it wouldn’t cover ‘pre-existing’ conditions, but I thought that meant anything the dog has had prior to signing up for the insurance, not that they’d only pay for one incidence of each problem. That’s an eye-opener for me.
Yes… I don’t know how it works in other parts of the world, but this is how it works here.
It is very silly, because sometimes you might need to know whether something is covered by the insurance before you go ahead with a treatment/test. I mean, if this were an MRI or something really expensive.
You can’t know what you’re dealing with until you run the tests – yet some folk might not be able to afford to run the tests, if they’re not covered… but you can’t know if you’re covered until you run the tests!!!