Thank you for this thread FM wellbutrin. My best friend is my.... stepdog? An 8ish year old female pit bull that my ex-girlfriend rescued in 2012 as we were breaking up yet still cohabitating (sometimes life is complicated indeed.)So it turns out that the two lumps stepdog has had on her underside, the ones that I BEGGED the ex to get checked out three months ago, are mast cell tumors. Waiting on results so I'm hoping for Stage 1, I think? Either way we're planning to have them removed.Anywhoo, I read some older posts re: these fucking tumors and wanted 1)to thank you again, and 2) to encourage any FM with a happy ending to a similar story to chime in. Because I am on vacation this week and I don't want to be a sobbing mess the entire time.Oh, edited to say that I can try to handle any hard truths too, if you think I need to hear it.

ErikG wrote:Thank you for this thread FM wellbutrin. My best friend is my.... stepdog? An 8ish year old female pit bull that my ex-girlfriend rescued in 2012 as we were breaking up yet still cohabitating (sometimes life is complicated indeed.)So it turns out that the two lumps stepdog has had on her underside, the ones that I BEGGED the ex to get checked out three months ago, are mast cell tumors. Waiting on results so I'm hoping for Stage 1, I think? Either way we're planning to have them removed.Anywhoo, I read some older posts re: these fucking tumors and wanted 1)to thank you again, and 2) to encourage any FM with a happy ending to a similar story to chime in. Because I am on vacation this week and I don't want to be a sobbing mess the entire time.Oh, edited to say that I can try to handle any hard truths too, if you think I need to hear it.Sorry to hear this. You can't really grade these tumors without removing them, so unless they are doing on honest to goodness biopsy (not a needle aspirate) you can't tell what the deal is pre-operatively. This would be a little abnormal to do, we usually just look for spread to local lymph nodes +/- spleen and then remove then them with wide (3cm plus 1 or 2 fascial planes) margins and wait for the pathologist to tell us what to do. They can often be cured with surgery, particularly if they are under a few centimeters (especially low-grade) but sometimes are nasty and come back or spread.