What could have been an absolutely horrendous day has turned out pretty well, all things considered.
Consider the baseline: yesterday afternoon, when the emergency vet surgeons sewed Laszlo up, 2 hours after he went under, they'd removed his spleen, 3 litres of blood, and a potentially very malignant tumour the size of an orange. This evening, when we went to see him at the surgery, he was awake and up, and seemed his normal self, apart from the drip attached to him. By 11pm when Cleodhna phoned, he'd been eating and drinking, which is a stunning rate of recovery.
The cancer Laszlo had is a sort of blood blister cancer, where the tumour fills up with blood and is comparatively benign - until it bursts, in which case you're in major trouble. It can be filling up for years and you'd never notice it - it's between internal organs, and it doesn't affect anything else.
The first tumour burst yesterday, and Laszlo immediately stopped, started walking a bit strangely, and wanted to go back home rather than carry on with the walk. The second burst today (Sunday), we think, and is probably what stopped Laszlo from walking normally, and made him refuse to go upstairs. (3 litres of blood sloshing around your abdomen will make anyone walk funny.) We phoned the emergency vet, and within an hour the vet checked out Laszlo and pretty soon reckoned he needed surgery.
And all we could do was go home, wait for the phone call, and hope that it wasn't the vet saying that the cancer had spread, and that it would be unfair to wake Laszlo up.
It appears, though, that we've dodged a bullet, and the Laszlo should make a full recovery.
The moral? Get your pets insured, and insured with petplan. By all accounts they don't dick people or animals about, and may even be close to having a soul.
