Burger Butt

Four months ago, Ernie spent a day at the vet having an owie removed; a benign tumor on the outside of his thigh. The surgery went fine and he seemed to feel a lot better with it gone, but it took forever to heal. Greyhound skin is so thin that it doesn't hold stitches very well, and they kept pulling out. So, anyway, it finally heals, more or less, leaving a big pink scar -- we call him "burger butt" -- and he's got another lump in the same area. He went back to the vet yesterday to get it removed.

Poor old guy. He'll be 12 next month. While that's not terribly old for a greyhound, it's getting up there. He can still manage a 3-mile walk around Green Lake, as long as he can sleep the rest of the afternoon, but his legs get shaky if he has to stand for any length of time, and he sometimes has trouble getting up on the slippery hardwood floor.

We usually adopt older dogs; seven or eight or nine year old dogs that are returned for one reason or another. When we adopted Ernie, he was not yet three. We've had him longer than any of the other retired racers we've lived with. We took him in as a foster, during the holidays, because all the usual foster homes were full. We actually maintained the fiction that he was a foster for a couple of days before conceding that he was staying with us for good. Even as a youngster he was always polite, reserved, gentlemanly. Not a kisser or a cuddler. If you needed a dog to make a fuss over you, he wasn't it. He was a cat-person's kind of dog. He still is, pretty much. He gets excited about a treat, or a walk, or ride in the car, in his reserved, Ernie-kind of way. You have to know him to see it.

We picked him up yesterday afternoon. The pre-surgery bloodwork looked good, and the surgery went fine. The vet says he's in pretty good shape, all things considered. He was pretty sore last night, but seems better this morning. He has a new, 5 inch incision right next to the old scar.

Old Burger Butt.