clipper causes skin rash after surgery for lipoma

I hope you'll forgive me for yet another post about Penny's surgery, but I thought our experience might be useful information for other people deciding whether to go for this option if their dog has a lump.

We visited the vet for a check-up today, four days after the surgery, and the wound looked swollen around the stitches, which the vet said was 'serum' around the wound. It might have been the result of Penny's activity since the operation. We'll take it even more quietly for a few days until the wound is not swollen-looking. On the other hand, Penny has mostly been resting and we only go out to toilet a few times a day, on lead.

The ghastly-looking redness around the wound was most likely a rash from the clippers used to remove her coat around the site for surgery. Here's the photo from a few days ago:

 and today it is much less sore-looking:

In this photo you can see that there is no stitch at one end of the cut. The vet said he left this open in case the wound needed to drain.

Whilst reading up  for this post, I've come across a really good article at The Kerry Blue Terrier Foundation, dealing with the question of whether or not to have surgery for a lipoma.

The article discusses the pros and  cons, gives lots of case studies, and talks about other possibilities than surgery, including:
watch and wait
no treatment
liposuction
injection of collagenaze
weight loss, diet and exercise
acupressure
herbal medicines
homeopathy (not much success reported)
aromatherapy

One thing I was glad to read was that modern anaesthesia means that it should be safe for even an older dog to undergo surgery for a lipoma. I must admit this was highest in my list of worries when  we opted for surgery.

still resting the cut paw

It's  been a quiet week and I can feel my fitness slipping away and my waistline thickening, because Penny is still confined to the house to wait for her injured paw to recover, and I've discovered I don't walk if I don't have the motivation of taking her with me.

We're starting to play games at dinner time, feeding her meals as rewards for picking up her toys and putting them in the bucket; finding the nominated toy (not too successful); taking a bow; backing up; 'paws up'. Anything to keep her mind active, even if her body is not.

It's darned hard to find activities that don't involve using her front paws. I gave her a Kong filled with nice things (a couple of bits of kibble, a smear of peanut butter, some raw carrot pieces, a bit of cheese) and she worked diligently at it for about twenty minutes. But seeing she was holding it firm with her front paw, this wasn't such a good idea! She ended up with a sore paw.

Not long now, I hope. I think it's nearly healed up. We've been swishing it with saline solution twice a day and squirting Betadine onto the cut. Bandages are giving us lots of entertainment - I crouch on the floor, carefully wrapping her paw in nice clean gauze, see her settled, go away and walk back in to find the bandage on the floor and Penny resting comfortably. Lucky her paw is so small and only needs a short piece of bandage - otherwise I think we'd have gone through even more bandaging than we have. I'll have to refine my bandage-tying technique.

Penny's poor sore paw

On Sunday, Penny cut her front paw while we were walking in the bush.

I guess we've been lucky this has never happened before. However, it did mean that I was unsure how to deal with it. First I washed the cut with salty water, a couple of times, then I bandaged it loosely. Which left the problem of how to go outside for toileting without getting the bandage wet. (We've had lots of rain lately, which you won't find me complaining about after the fifteen or more years of drought we endured.)

Well, that didn't work all that well. There are a couple of plastic bags lying somewhere in the yard, lost within minutes of our going out in the dark.

Today, when we came back to Melbourne, I decided to scout the Net for more information, and found some sites that were quite helpful. I was pleased that Betadine was recommended on some of them, as I've got Betadine spray. So I've sprayed it and put a fresh bandage on, and we'll see how things look tomorrow.

One recommendation that seemed sensible was to wrap only a couple of layers around the paw, because if the bandaging is too thick, the dog will notice it more, and therefore be more likely to lick at it. (I recall from Penny's previous biopsy bandaging how important it is to keep the bandage dry.)

This squidoo says we should rebandage the paw twice a day, so I guess I'll do that.

The Dog Owner's Home Veterinary Handbook says a fresh wound longer than half an inch should be sutured, but says if the wound is older than twelve hours, suturing is questionable. If I'd been in Melbourne I would have taken her straight to the vet to see if stitches would help. But we were too far away.

At the moment she seems to be comfortable, and in fact isn't even limping much. She's taking her weight fully on both front legs.

I'll call the vet tomorrow, to check whether I'm doing the right thing, and I'm going to ask about a recommendation by Julia Szabo on a dogster site, that the wound will heal faster if it is kept soft:

Then, to help speed healing, I applied some Buck Mountain Wound Balm, the same excellent ointment I used on my dog Tiki when he was fighting cancer. This stuff packs the triple healing punch of burdock, yarrow, and echinacea, and is a first-rate item to keep in the K9 first aid kit. Without some kind of ointment to keep the tissue soft, a wound takes longer to heal - and with the location of this wound, recovery speed really counts.

On looking at the Buck Mountain Herbal Gold site, I see that it is recommended for minor cuts and closed wounds, and that using salve on an infection that is not clean and dry might accelerate the infection, so I think I'll definitely ask for advice from the vet before doing anything other than keeping the wound clean and infection-free.

I might try using aloe vera, if the vet says it is important to keep the paw pad soft.