Sarcoma Removal in a Dog.
This video is of a dog with a type of tumour called sarcoma. Sacromas are a cancer of the “connective tissue” in the body, such as bones, fibrous tissue and fat. In this case, it is a liposarcoma, which is a tumour of the fat cells.
This is quite a young dog, only 18 months old. It is unusual to find such a nasty tumour in such a young dog, but I have seen them in dogs as young as 10 weeks old.
Planning the surgery
Before planning a surgery like this, we have taken a sample with a needle to confirm that it is a cancerous lump. As you can see from the video, you want to be sure you know what you are dealing with as it’s a big surgery.
We tend to find Sarcomas are locally invasive tumours. that means that the cancerous cells spread out beyond the apparent tumour margins. For sarcomas, you need to remove 3-5 cm of normal tissue around the tumour to be sure that you have removed it all. They are quite slow to spread, so if we can surgically remove the whole tumour we can normally cure the dog.
You will see in the video that the tumour looks quite small compared to the final surgical wound, but it is critically important that we ensure the cancer is completely removed at the first surgery. If we left some cancerous cells behind, the tumour would regrow and we would need an even bigger surgery to treat the dog.
What next?
We will send the sample to the laboratory to confirm the cancer type and ensure we have removed the whole tumour. We expect this dog to be completely cured and live a normal, happy life from here.