Our dog, Devon, hasn’t been feeling well lately. He stopped eating, and wouldn’t do much other than just lay in his bed. Lisa took him to the vet, where they did an abdominal x-ray. Something looked amiss. His intestines were compressed by something. The vet suggested an ultrasound to determine the cause of the compression. It turns out, one ultrasound and a biopsy later that he has some benign tumors on his spleen. One of them is 6 cm x 6 cm. Since there didn’t seem to be any cancer associated with the tumors, the vet suggested that a splenectomy would help him with the issue, and that he didn’t really need a spleen to survive. At this point I asked myself: what does the spleen do? The answer, as always, is available at Wikipedia. It turns out, it is possible to survive without a spleen, gallbladder, or appendix. I’m sure some fiendish mind has considered this as another possible form of weight loss.

All of these procedures we have done may sound trivial, but they have been expensive: the xray visit was $450. The Ultrasound visit was $650. The splenectomy visit is set to cost $2000. I just hope that this solves his issues. He is a sweet dog, and we all want to see him back to his old friendly self. Note to self: look in to pet insurance before the pets get sick…