Subtitled: Fingers in the Mouth of an Angry Cat
Background: We didn’t know anything was wrong until my husband took this picture. In it, you can see that our cat Halley has a lump on her tongue.
Diagnosis: Mast cell tumor? I think that’s it. (It was something that is pretty rare in cats.)
Treatment: Operation to remove it.
Status: It might be coming back, but prying her mouth open to check isn’t working even for the vet as the lump is too far back and she contorts her tongue if you open her mouth.
Idea: Get her to yawn.
If she were a person, this would be easy. But I have discovered that ostentatiously yawning in front of her doesn’t work. Nor does poetry recitation. Is there a way to get a cat to yawn?
I don’t know about cats, but I could always make my dog yawn by rubbing his cheeks with my fingertips. It’s hard to describe exactly how I did it, but I’ll try.
Take one hand, thumb and index finger curved into a C shape. Put the tip of the thumb on one cheek about halfway back, where the gap between the top and bottom teeth is. Put the index fingertip on the other cheek, directly opposite the thumb. Gently push the finger and thumb towards each other (like you’re trying to coax the teeth apart), move them in tiny little circles, pull them back to where they’re just resting on the cheeks, and repeat.
Always worked with the dog. He might have just been humoring me though.
Have one person pry open the mouth and one person grab the tip of the tongue with some gauze and pull it out. The cat won’t like it, of course, but maybe someday she’ll realize it was for her own good.
With one hand on each side of her head, feel for the rearmost molars through the skin of her cheeks. Gently massage this spot on both sides of her jaw until she yawns or opens her mouth. Works every time. :o
She won’t particularly enjoy it, but she shouldn’t put of too much of a fuss.
We’ve tried all sorts of variations on this. Lemme tell you, a cat’s tongue is really strong and very hard to grab! She gets hysterical at the vet, so he was hoping we’d have better success at home, but it hasn’t worked that way.
She’s a mutt, but she’s rather magnificent, isn’t she? 15 pounds of purring fluff who really really really hates the vet.
Not the craziest idea I’ve thought of!
So, I’m not the only loon who wants a cat to yawn, huh?
jsgoddess: So what happened, already? You’ve been around long enough to know that we crackers for animals Dopers will want to know the outcome - and her health status.
Still no success with the open mouth experiement, and Halley is getting sick of me trying! I’m giving something away in my body language, because if I reach for her head to pet her, she stays, but if I reach for her head to try to see in her mouth, she runs away.
I was in prime position to see her yawning yesterday and she did one of those half-yawn cat things then stared at me. She’s toying with me!
Would it be possible for the vet to give you a sedative of some sort to give her, to mellow or knock her out enough to tolerate your poking and prodding?
Could I ask how the diagnosis of mast cell tumor/mastocytoma was made? Just curious, as all similar masses in my experience (many years) have been eosinophilic granulomas. Exfoliative cytology alone cannot (IME) differentiate MCT from EG.
I was always able to get one of my cats to yawn by giving it a little scratch on the end of it’s nose. Right on the top, the hairy part, right around where it meets the end (the bald part with the nostrils). Just little scratches always made it yawn, but then it took a while to “recharge”. I couldn’t keep doing it over and over. I’m not sure if it works on all cats.
She had two lumps on her tongue, on red and one white. The red one was closer to the front, and the white one was very far back, almost invisible. The vet thought eosinophilic granulomas because she had also developed rodent ulcers on her lips. But he could see the white one just barely and was concerned. So they biopsied and found that the front one was an eosinophilic granuloma and the back one was a mast cell tumor. And, if I remember correctly which I might not, it was the first mast cell mouth tumor the vet or lab had ever seen in a cat.
The rodent ulcers come back on occasion, so we take her in for shots. The tongue had looked a little scooped in and now there might be a bit of a bump or ridge way back.
Does any of this make sense and accord with your experience?
