
06/30/2025
Update on Téa from after her tumor removal.
Potential Trigger Warning: actual pictures from tumor removal surgery and tumor.
This is another personal as well as educational post. I do a good body inspection every week for every glider in my care, personal as well as rescue gliders. I advocate for all owners to do the same. Because I do good body exams every week, I was able to find a small lump in one of my girls.
After 14 days of antibiotics she went back in for her tumor and pouch removal surgery on 3 June 2025. My vet was nice enough to take pictures throughout the process, I’ve labeled the pictures.
Histopathology came back and thankfully the tumor was not cancerous, but multiple cysts had developed adjacent to the primary tumor. It was determined to be a benign mammary tumor and with the complete removal of her pouch, the vets consider there to be no risk of the tumor reoccurring.
We continued antibiotics and anti inflammatory for another week and added Gabapentin for additional pain management. She was in an e-jacket for two weeks until the 15th of June when I was finally able to gently remove the last of her scab and 1 stitch that hadn’t quite dissolved yet (don’t worry, it was completely fine, however I would not recommend anyone without experience doing). We had her in a small hospital cage with no wheel to limit climbing and movement while she was healing. We used OE (Open Environment) pouch to make it easier for her to crawl into and out of the pouch easier while wearing the e-jacket and another one with fleece poms to provide a little enrichment.
She lost quite a bit of weight during this time, she was 87.3g before she went in for surgery, she dropped as low as 62g, but as of 26 June she’s back up to 72.6g. With other similar cases, this amount of weight loss has been seen, I will definitely continue to monitor her weight while she continues to recover. Since she wasn’t eating very well, I had to give her subcutaneous fluids daily to help her stay hydrated.
Since she was in an e-jacket and could not groom herself to help keep herself clean, twice a day I would help by using unscented baby wipes to clean her. I went over the incision with a cotton ball sprayed with Vetericyn VF twice a day to help prevent infection.