In knee news, as of yesterday, the bruising is healed enough that I can ride normally (though I have to exercise some caution in riding because if I bump my stitches, I’m likely to bleed a lot). So, I’ll stop wallowing around on the couch feeling sorry for myself and get back to my normal training schedule.

In more important news, Turbo, my Belgian Malinois, had surgery a week ago.

Over the Thanksgiving at Syllamo, I’d found a suspicious-feeling lump under one of her nipples, and I took her in Monday morning to have it checked by the vet. He wanted to remove it and send it off for biopsy, and ended up doing Mastectomy surgery later that afternoon. She came home that evening in a cone of shame and has been recovering well since (I know the picture makes her look pitiful, but, as I type this, she’s out back in the thing, chasing after a squirrel).

Friday afternoon, he called back with biopsy results. The news wasn’t the best or worst- it was a malignant tumor in her mammary glands, but it’s wasn’t an aggressive form, and didn’t seem to have spread to anywhere else where one would expect it to spread. Apparently, there’s no such thing as a dog mammogram, so Turbo will get weekly breast/lymph node exams for the rest of her life to make sure that nothing is coming back. For now, she’s doing fine and getting extra neck scratches (the cone of shame seems to make her neck itchy) as well as the extra bite of food off of my plate.

I love dogs.