I see Meadow, my 10-year-old Alaskan Malamute, standing with her head slightly lowered, a small pool of yellow vomit on the floor in front of her. Her front legs are splayed wide. Before I can reach her, she stumbles and falls hard to the floor, then struggles to stand up. Stumbling like a drunk, she slams to the floor again. What the hell’s going on?

Gilberto had it bad. when I asked, “When did you get Carly?” he recited the exact date he had adopted his beloved Pointer cross from a shelter two years earlier.

“They told me she only had a couple of months to live — cancer — and, for that reason alone, no one was going to take her. Not to mention her problem with other dogs.”

Skin lumps can be tricky. we stick them with a needle, suck up some cells, smear the sample on a slide and take a peek down a microscope, but sometimes we still can’t make a diagnosis. This leaves us with the option of surgery on a lump of unknown provenance and the dilemma of how wide an excision to make. If the culprit is benign, the surgery need not be radical. But what if the lump is malignant? Should the surgeon be aggressive, just in case? How on earth do we strike the perfect balance?