I had a shock the other evening. The middle aged girls were out playing when I noticed a boy amongst them. I must have left one of the boys out when I put the group home.

Then I looked more closely and realised that it was little Verity with a very convincing set of furry cushions down there. She had a large tumour just below her tail, slightly to the left. We trotted up to see the vet, with me expecting to be told they couldn’t remove it because of its position. But no, the vet said it should be possible to remove it, but it felt very lumpy and was probably a fairly nasty tumour. We decided that they would start a removal operation, but phone me if it didn’t look as if they would be able to remove it all.

I spent the morning waiting for a call that I hoped wouldn’t come, and thankfully it didn’t. My walk home from work was spent on a high, as she had obviously come through the operation well and would be with us for a while more yet. I stopped off at the vets’, paid a hideous amount of money for an operation which had been very successful but taken much longer than expected, and waited to collect her.

The nurse came out and said, “I’m afraid Verity is going to have to stay a little longer. I went to bring her out and she’s removed all her stitches. We’ll phone you later to let you know when you can collect her.” My guess is that the Metacam painkiller injection that she had during the op had worn off.

The call finally came at seven o’clock, so I drove up to pick Verity up and then spent the evening trying to distract her from the stitches. I tried wrapping her to stop her bending round to chew, but I couldn’t get the bandage round tight enough on my own and there was no-one around at home to help. I finally went against the vet’s advice and gave her some Meloxidyl (the oral form of Metacam), with the thought that it was probably safer to give her too much painkiller than for her to go under anaesthetic again. Thankfully that did the trick and she spent the rest of the night in the hospital cage with a heat pad under one corner. She loved that!

Come the morning and Verity’s stitches are un-chewed. Hurrah. She now has some company and seems almost back to her normal self. We’ll keep her on a small dose of Meloxidyl for a while though.