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Greta is OK, thank goodness.

For quite some time now, Greta has had a growth on her right ear. My husband and I finally decided a couple weeks ago to have it removed and tested.

And since then, we've been waiting for the test results to come back. I got a call from the vet yesterday that Greta is just fine. The mass was a dermal melanocytoma, a benign tumor of the melanocytes. I'm still not sure exactly what that means, but she said that there's a chance they can be malignant. But in Greta's case, it was benign. And she said it won't be recurring.

So, good news for Greta. Not so great for our checking account. More than a few hundred dollars later we're wondering if we should have bothered having this growth removed at all. If it had been cancer, would we have taken any further steps? Unfortunately, finances have to factor in to decisions like that.

But thankfully we don't have to discuss it further and we know that Greta has many more healthy years ahead of her.

Poor girl, though, was embarrassed and tortured by wearing the "cone of shame" after her surgery. It didn't last long, though. She took care of that. On her first day home alone, my husband came home from work to find Greta wearing only 2/3 of the e-collar. She somehow had broken it. A desperate attempt at freedom, I'm sure. So we removed it from around her neck, much to her delight and ours. We hated that she had to wear it, she was bumping into everything and looked so sad and depressed.