Shortly after we moved, Joy noticed a small hard lump on Wednesday’s back. She wouldn’t let us examine it closely, and since Simon has a nasty habit of ambushing the other cats and jumping on their backs we thought maybe it was a healing bite. When a week later it had not gotten any better — was in fact larger — we started to get worried. Adding to our suspicion was the fact that we could now feel a second smaller lump beside the first.
We had the gnarly little grisly lumps removed and sent off for biopsy, and the results confirmed our fears: fibrosarcoma. The pathologist felt it was an vaccine associated sarcoma. Wednesday has not received a vaccination in that area since 1999 that we know of, however there was an incident in 2003 where we were very suspicious that a veterinarian that we had left her hospitalized with for a day mistakenly vaccinated her while she was there. She has a previous history of vaccine reactions where she vomits violently and repeatedly for hours afterwards (which is why she’s only gotten rabies vaccines, which are given in the right leg, since ’99) and this happened after that visit. The clinic said they did not vaccinate her, but we still suspected there had been a mixup and she’d gotten a shot. If a vaccine she wasn’t even supposed to get to begin with set this thing off, that would be a sad irony.
This cancer has a 60-80% recurrence rate and the lumps have already returned. The incision site took over a month to heal — We won’t put her through that again so our best hope is that the cancer will grow slowly enough that it won’t impact her quality of life for as long as possible.
hello,
my cat rexi has a huge hard lump on her right thigh. I had it sent for a biopsy. I am waiting the results but i feel it is vaccine related fibrosarcoma. My heart is broken. I am very sorry for your cat, I hope she is still doing well. I would appreciate it if you could offer me any advice as far as doing treatments or if it is better to leave her alone. thank you very much.
Hi Laura,
Sorry for the late reply. I hope Rexi’s lump did not turn out to be a fibrosarcoma. Our Wednesday is doing OK at this time but the lump did come back and is growing quickly. In her case we have decided not to put her through any further surgery because she has had so many surgeries in her life before and has other health issues. The vet that removed the lump didn’t really follow the proper procedure and did not take a large enough margin around the area so it was no surprise that it recurred.
There are a lot of useful resources on the catshots.com site, and from what we understand most veterinarians are referring fibrisarcoma removals to surgical specialists, because of the very aggressive removal needed.
I hope that Rexi’s lump turned out to be benign.
Take care,
Chris