Dr. Lera Clone at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital examines Bo, a one-year-old dog with a 13 mm growth at the corner of his mouth that's been growing for a month. She recommends a biopsy because the location makes wide surgical margins difficult, unlike a previous mast cell tumor case that needed reconstructive flap surgery.
Questions this video answers
One-year-old male, neutered.
At the commissure (corner) of the mouth.
About 13 millimeters.
About one month.
Fingers, face, elbows, knees, and the area around the mouth (commissure).
Chapters
Hey guys, My name is Dr. Lara here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with Bo. Bo is a one year old male neuter. And Bo is here because he has a small mass on his mouth, on the what we call the commissure of his mouth. And the mass is about the size of 13 millimeters. So just to give you guys an idea of scale, see here we're looking about that size. Okay. And we can put it next to my fingernail so that you have an idea. All right. And so mom's asking me, you know, kind of what the thoughts are. Now, this mass has been there for about a month. And so what if when I, you know, I have a mass or something like that and a client is asking me about it. Typically, if they come to me relatively quickly, the first thing that I'll typically say is either A, you can watch it, or B, we could look at putting him on some sort of anti inflammatories, antibiotic, maybe some topical therapy as well. It's been about a month that mom's been monitoring and she does feel that it is getting bigger. And so when I see the location of it, which is right in this area right here, for me, that gives me a little pause in regards to whether or not I need to be more aggressive. And the recommendation at that point is there are a few locations on a patient where I tend to be more aggressive with biopsies or finding blast for it versus just watching it. The fingers are one, the face is two, the elbows is three, the knees is four, and right around here is going to be five as well. Just because if you have something where you have to get what are called clean margins and you need to get a really big incision around to get it off, it's going to be more challenging to do that when you don't have extra skin to go ahead and close the area that you're trying to remove the mask from. So at this point, you know, I was talking to mom and I was telling her my recommendation is that I would go ahead and I would actually lean more in the direction of collecting a incisional biopsy from his mouth. So that way we could figure out what exactly is going on and, and then we can determine is it something that is going to require really big margins like I was describing before, or is it something that we might be able to get away with closer margins? And one of the patients, for example, where we had biopsy information, that kind of stuff was Francis and Frances. This is referring to one of our previous videos where we talked about mast cell tumors. She had this big mass or this mass on her face. It was a mast cell tumor and because of the kind of tumor it was, we ended up getting really big margins. We had to make a surgical flap where we rotated it over kind of crazy stuff. Dr. Jen Babefski was a surgeon who did that surgery. She's awesome. If you guys want, you can follow her at Core Veterinary Surgery, but at the end of the day, my recommendation is to go ahead and collect a biopsy on this particular patient because of the location and because it seems to be growing. If you guys have any questions about this particular A topic, please leave it in the comment section. Otherwise, if you found this video, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share. Thanks for watching and have a great day. Hey Bo, what do you think.
