No, Really: I Still Plan to Write About Books!

I have read something like ten books since I last wrote a post about one of the ostensible focuses (foci?) of my blog.  Some of them I really liked (Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere), and one I just could not finish (Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow).  However, with my own novel completed and the query process looming, my worries about Dorothy, and worries about Muttboy’s health, I have not been able to write about books.  I will get back to that, though, once I get my stressed mind under control. I also have some general lit-related posts brewing in my mind.

For the past couple of years, Muttboy has had a strange little growth on the skin of his chest.  It started off small, about the size of an insect bite–and that’s what we thought it was for a long time–but has grown disturbingly larger.  It does not seem to bother him at all, except when I get anxious and pick at it.  He hates to be picked at.  Petted and loved, yes, picked at, no.  The vet was not concerned when I first showed it to her a bit over a year ago, and I more or less forgot about it.

It has been getting larger, though, and my worries have grown along with it.  I took him to the vet today to have it examined.  He got picked at a lot, and he was not terribly happy about it, but Muttboy is, above all, a good boy, and he behaved himself very well.  The only bad thing he did was balk at standing on the slippery metal lift table, and I really can’t blame him for that.  Once we got him on the table, he was great.  He endured the gamut of annoying picks–everything from having his toenails clipped to having blood drawn to having a fine needle aspiration of the cyst.

In a week or so we will know for sure what the cyst is.  When the doctor was preparing to examine him, I told her my concern about it being an MCT (even though it does not really look like one), and she was surprised that my concerns matched hers.  I wonder if doctors really hate Google and all of the health sites that people read before going to their IRL doctors.  At any rate, even if it is an MCT, the doctor told me not to worry as it is treatable, and, since Muttboy has no MCT symptoms at all, he will probably be fine.  Whatever the lab work says, Muttboy will have some surgery in a couple of weeks.  I am definitely more worried about it than he is.

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