Sumner Scores a Surgery

For quite a long while, Sumner has had a small skin tag growing on his back right leg. We've been keeping an eye on it and the vet has not been worried about it. In the last couple of weeks, though, Sumner had begun to be bothered by it more and to obsess over it. And that's understandable, given that it had sort of exploded in size, making it quite noticeable in the photo above.

Not only had it grown quickly lately, and was rather concerning to him, it had also been bleeding some. Thanksgiving Day, for instance, involved wiping up large drops of blood from the kitchen floor as he'd passed through. It was time for having it removed.

That happened on the final day of November, with an early morning drop-off:

...and a noontime pick-up, at which time the surgical site offered a testament to the way that benign growth had entrenched itself.

A cone was necessary, but thank goodness those are not the irritating and hard-to-navigate plastic of old. Sumner was pretty loopy from the anesthesia, traumatized a bit, also perhaps in pain, and it took him about four hours to stop whine-panting and actually settle down and take a brief nap that Wednesday. By evening you could tell he was starting to feel back to normal, ate a healthy dinner, and was excited to bed down, even with the cone. We slept upstairs in the nook in the mancave together.

Then, on Thursday morning, he woke up very much his old self, happy and excited about the day, full of sweetness and tame energy. While he might look sedate in this morning coffee shot, he was just quite content waiting for me to be ready for him to shift to my lap once I sat down with my coffee. We had a fine day together, with the cone on until he decided late afternoon to work on his food. After that, I was with him constantly and we left it off...and he was so good about not messing with his sutures.