Last November Leo, a 16 yr old long haired male neutered tabby was brought to us with a messy lump on his left foreleg hidden under his long coat. Leo isn't the easiest cat to examine and he told us so very clearly. The lump looked like an abscess so we treated him with antibiotics and assessed him a few days later. The lump was no better and clearly needed attention so we admitted him for general anaesthetic. Once we had him asleep and were able to clip away the matter hair around the lump we found a large skin tumour. It was ulcerated, oozing and looked very active (growing rapidly). We removed the tumour immediately carefully cutting the tissue back to normal skin. But we had a problem - there was not enough skin remaining to close the wound. We closed the wound as much as we could then used an artificial skin dressing to fill the gap and encourage granulation, His leg was banadaged for the following 7 - 10 days.

The tumour on the left foreleg                                      Removal

Control of bleeding                                                       Closure

Leo made a good recover, but we had to sedate him to be able to change his dressing! The pathology report described the growth as an anaplastic giant cell tumour with a tendency to invade local tissues. We anticipated that it might re-grow.
After a couple of weeks the wound was looking clean and beginning to close with healthy granulation tissue.  Over the next 6 to 8 weeks the wound healed, hair grew back and he seemed to be doing well.


Leo sedated at check up                                The wound after 2 weeks

    The wound at 4 weeks                                               Healed and hair re-grown at 7 weeks

Unfortunately in February, 3 months after his initial operation there were signs of tumour re-growth at the site of the operation. This time the only reasonable option was to amputate his left foreleg.
Leo is now 3 legged  - but quite content, he gets about almost as well as he did before he lost his leg,
and he's pleased not to have to keep coming in to the surgery!

Leo's owners sent us this cartoon - as it reminded them of David (and Leo)!

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