Cancer (General)
Various types of cancer. Track symptoms, treatment side effects, and quality of life.
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The Lump You've Found: When to Worry, and Why "Wait and See" Is the Wrong Move
You've found a lump, and the question in your head is how worried to be. Most of the time, the answer is: less than you fear. Lumps are one of the commonest reasons owners bring a dog or cat in to us, and the large majority turn out to be harmless.
Cancer and Your Pet: Start Here
People reach this page from a few different places. Some have just found a lump that wasn't there last month. Some sat in a consulting room an hour ago and stopped hearing properly after the word "cancer". Some have lived with a diagnosis for a while and are weighing up what to do next, or...
Benign or Not? The Common Lumps That Aren't Cancer
You've found a lump, you've read that most of them turn out to be harmless, and now you'd like to put a name to yours. It's a fair question, and a hopeful one, so let's go through it properly. A handful of everyday lumps and bumps come up again and again in the consulting room:...
"My Vet Wants to Take a Sample": Aspirates, Biopsies and What the Results Mean
Your vet has felt the lump, gone quiet for a moment, and then said it: "I'd like to take a sample." Four words that can set a lot of worry going. Does asking for a sample mean they already think it's cancer? Will it hurt? How long is the wait, and what is the result...
The Warning Signs of Cancer in Dogs and Cats (and the Quieter Feline Ones)
Something has caught your eye. Your dog's a bit slower on walks, or your cat's gone off her food. Maybe there's a lump you weren't expecting, or a smell, or a sore that won't quite heal. And sitting behind it is the word nobody likes to think about.
Osteosarcoma in Dogs: The Amputation Decision, and Life on Three Legs
Osteosarcoma is bone cancer, and the treatment your vet will raise first is amputation. That pairing is enough to make most owners want to stop the conversation right there, because the picture it puts in your head is of your dog hobbling about, diminished and struggling. It's worth knowing before you decide anything: the part...
Mast Cell Tumours: The Lump That's "the Great Pretender"
A mast cell tumour rarely announces itself. More often it's a small soft bump, or a raised patch you took for an insect bite or a wart, sometimes one that swelled up and then shrank back down and so got left alone. When your vet says that ordinary-looking thing is cancer, most owners feel they've...
Lymphoma in Cats: The Commonest Feline Cancer
Feline lymphoma rarely announces itself. Unlike in dogs, there's usually no obvious lump under the jaw. Instead an older cat tends to lose condition slowly: a bit thinner, picking at meals, being sick more often than seems right. The signs are vague enough that the diagnosis, when the tests come back, often arrives with very...
Lymphoma in Dogs: The Most Treatable Common Cancer
Lymphoma is one of the few cancers in dogs where treatment reliably works, and where most dogs feel genuinely well throughout. It usually announces itself as a firm, painless lump under the jaw, found while you're fussing your dog or doing up a collar, in a dog who is otherwise bright, eating and completely themselves....
"How Long Has My Pet Got?" Reading a Prognosis Honestly
How long has my pet got? It's the question almost every owner asks the moment the room goes quiet, and a lot of people are too frightened to say it out loud. You want a number, something solid to hold on to. Often you'll be given one: "the median survival time is about six months",...
You've Heard the Word "Cancer": What Grade, Stage and Prognosis Actually Mean
A cancer diagnosis is serious. It is not, by itself, a death sentence, and plenty of pets go on to live good lives, sometimes for years, after one. What happens next depends far more on the particular details of this cancer than on the word your vet used, and those details are what this page...
Bladder Cancer (Transitional Cell Carcinoma): Signs and Options
The path to this diagnosis rarely runs through a lump you can feel. More often it runs through a dog who keeps straining in the garden, squatting again and again, leaving little spots of blood, and a course of antibiotics that helps for a fortnight and then stops helping. A second course. A third. You...
Injection-Site Sarcoma in Cats: The One You've Never Heard Of
A week or two after your cat's routine vaccinations, you run a hand over her and feel a small lump under the skin, right where the needle went in. The visit had gone fine. Then you look it up, and a phrase you've never come across appears: injection-site sarcoma. All of a sudden a tiny...
Oral Tumours: Canine Melanoma and Feline Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Most of us check our pets' eyes, their ears, the lump on the flank. The inside of the mouth is the one place we almost never look until something makes us. So oral tumours tend to show up late, and through their side effects rather than the lump itself. A smell on the breath that...
Soft Tissue Sarcoma: The Lump That Needs More Than a Simple "Lumpectomy"
A soft tissue sarcoma usually turns up as a firm lump on a leg, a shoulder or the chest wall, sitting just under the skin and feeling neatly self-contained. It can be there a good while before anyone worries about it. Then the diagnosis comes back, and the conversation isn't the one most owners expect....
Mammary (Breast) Tumours in Dogs and Cats, and the Neutering Link
You're running your hand over your dog or cat and your fingers catch on something that wasn't there last month. A small firm bead, or a row of them, sitting along the line of the tummy where the teats are. That's mammary tissue, and the word that tends to arrive next is "breast cancer".
Haemangiosarcoma: The Hard Truth About the "Silent" Splenic Cancer
Haemangiosarcoma is a cancer that usually announces itself with a collapse, not a lump. A dog who seemed perfectly well in the morning is in an emergency room by the afternoon, and a scan has found a mass on the spleen. If that is roughly where you are, you deserve plain speaking rather than false...
What Does Cancer Treatment Cost, and How Do People Pay for It?
"And roughly what does that cost?" is one of the hardest questions for an owner to ask, and one of the most sensible. A lot of people swallow it, as though loving a pet properly means money shouldn't come into it. It should, and it does. The cost of cancer treatment is a real constraint...
Pet Chemotherapy Is Not Human Chemotherapy: What to Really Expect
Say the word "chemotherapy" to most owners and one picture arrives: a person they loved, exhausted and sick, hair gone, counting down hard months. It is one of the most frightening images any of us carry. So when a vet uses that same word about a beloved dog or cat, plenty of owners say no...
Should I Treat? Treating, Comfort Care, and Why There's No Wrong Answer
There is no wrong answer here, and that is the thing most owners reach this decision without ever being told plainly. Whether you choose to treat your pet's cancer or to keep them comfortable and happy without treatment, you can be making the right, loving choice. Both paths are real veterinary medicine, chosen by good...
Clinical Trials, Immunotherapy and Newer Options: Real Hope Versus Hype
Most owners who go searching after a cancer diagnosis end up in the same place around midnight: a website promising what the vet wouldn't, a powder or a protocol or a clinic that uses the word "cure". The searching itself makes complete sense. You want to leave nothing untried for an animal you love, and...
Getting a Referral to a Veterinary Oncologist, and When to Seek a Second Opinion
Two questions tend to surface once cancer is on the table, and most owners are too polite to ask them out loud. Should we be seeing a specialist? And would asking for one offend our own vet? The answers are kinder than people fear. Seeing a specialist is a normal, well-trodden path, and it doesn't...
Radiation Therapy for Pets: When It's Used and What It's Like
Radiotherapy is one of the three main ways we treat cancer, alongside surgery and chemotherapy, and it does a job the other two often can't: it treats one specific spot very precisely, including spots a surgeon can't safely cut. The word tends to carry a lot of human baggage, though, because in people radiotherapy can...
Cancer Surgery: What Removing It Involves, and "Getting Clean Margins"
For a great many solid tumours, surgery is the main event. When a lump can be removed completely, with a clean edge of healthy tissue around it, that comes closer to a cure than anything else pet cancer treatment offers. It's genuinely good news, and worth holding on to when the word "operation" lands on...
Managing Your Pet's Pain and Comfort Through Cancer
Across all the worries a cancer diagnosis brings, the one that keeps owners awake at night usually isn't the prognosis or the cost. It's a plainer, harder question: is my pet in pain, and would I even know?
Cancer Treatment Emergencies: When to Call the Vet Right Now
There is one situation on cancer treatment where the difference between ringing tonight and ringing in the morning genuinely matters, and this page is about that situation. Most days, a pet on treatment is doing fine, and most of the small worries you'll have settle on their own. A few don't, and the trick is...
Going Through Chemo: What's Normal, and What Isn't
Fewer than one in four pets on chemotherapy get side effects you'd actually notice, like being sick or having loose stools, and most have none you can see at all (Michigan State University, 2024). That's the number worth holding onto in the early weeks, when every yawn looks like tiredness and every skipped biscuit looks...
Feeding a Pet With Cancer: Appetite, What to Feed, and the "Sugar" Myth
After a cancer diagnosis, food is often the first place owners want to act. Three questions come up almost every time: are they eating enough, is there a special diet I should be on, and should I cut the carbs because I read that sugar feeds cancer. Food is one of the few parts of...
Quality of Life You Can Measure: Using the Score to See What's Really Happening
Is he still enjoying life? Is she still happy? When a pet has cancer, that question turns up in the quiet moments, last thing at night or first thing in the morning, and there's rarely a clean answer to it. It's the kindest thing an owner can ask, and one of the hardest, because from...
Comfort-Focused Care: Choosing Quality of Life When You Don't Treat
Comfort-focused care is the path you take when you've decided not to treat the cancer itself. The reasons vary: sometimes the outlook didn't justify what the pet would go through, sometimes the cost was simply out of reach, sometimes it just wasn't the right road for this animal and this family. Whatever brought you to...
Complementary and Alternative Therapies: What Helps, What's Harmless, What's Hype
A diagnosis of cancer leaves most owners wanting to do something with their hands, and the internet is happy to fill that space. There's a supplement for the immune system, a mushroom blend, a diet that "starves" the tumour, a CBD oil that promises calm, and somewhere in the mix a site telling you the...
Making the Most of the Time: Good Days, Normality and What Matters
A few weeks after a cancer diagnosis, the question owners ask me tends to change. At first it's "how long has he got?" Once the early rush of tests and decisions has settled, a better one usually takes its place: how do we actually live with the time we have? That's the question this piece...
Remission: What It Means, and Watching for the Cancer Coming Back
Remission means your pet has come back to themselves. The lumps have gone, they're bright again, eating, daft, well. You'd think that word would bring nothing but relief, and partly it does. But for most owners there's a low hum of fear sitting just underneath it that never quite switches off. Every longer sleep, every...
The Quality-of-Life Decision, and Where to Go Next
When a pet's cancer can no longer be held back, the decision an owner faces is whether, and when, to let them go gently. It's one of the hardest decisions you will ever make, and you don't have to make it quickly or on your own. This page is here to help you see where...
Signs the Cancer Is Winning: Recognising Decline
There's a question owners often arrive at without quite saying it out loud: how do I tell when my pet is genuinely going downhill, rather than just having an off day? It's a fair thing to want to understand, and wanting to understand it doesn't mean you've given up hope. You know this animal better...
Breeds prone to Cancer (General)
Cancer (General) is seen more often in some breeds than others. If you have one of these, its breed guide covers what to watch for and where to get help.
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