This week is National Take Your Cat to the Vet Week. I have to admit that most of our cats do not get annual checkups for much of their lives. Since they have all been indoor cats, and two of them actively feared leaving the house, their vet visits were kept to a bare minimum until they were seniors.

Oliver was determined to observe this week, and in fact, he got things off to an early start by requiring a vet visit on Saturday. He had a small lump on his nose that looked dark around the edges and seemed to have grown over the course of a week. Any type of canine or feline lump that isn’t obviously attributable to injury or insect bite is reason for us to overreact wildly due to lumps on past pets turning out to be malignant.

Unlike some of our past cats, Oliver is not scarier than the Rottweilers when dealing with the vet. Dr. B was able to examine him easily. He thought it was most likely just an almost-healed scab from an injury, but there was also a small possibility it could be ringworm. He took a skin scraping to do a fungal culture and we’ll know the results in a week to 10 days.

Oliver’s nose looks a lot better already, though, so I’m thinking (and hoping) it was just a healing injury that looked a little strange.

(NaBloPoMo | August ’10: 16 of 31)