Differences oncological surgery cases may pose for recovery

While at the Fetch conference in Long Beach, California, Michael Jaffe, DVM, MS, CCRP, DACVS, sat down with dvm360 for an interview and explained what makes oncological surgery cases unique and how post-op could be different for these patients. He also shared what he likes about veterinary conferences like Fetch and what he takes away from these learning experiences.

The following is a partial transcript of the video.

Michael Jaffe, DVM, MS, CCRP, DACVS: Post-op surgical oncology cases can sometimes be challenging because, more often than not, we feel comfortable that we've completely removed whatever tumor we're trying to remove (if it's, say, a skin tumor). But oftentimes, we don't know that completely until we get our histopathology back. So when we're dealing with these post-op cases, we're always assuming that we've gotten clean margins, and we're moving from there. But sometimes we still don't know.

And then the other part of that is, we don't know in all cases, how malignant or whether it is a malignancy that we're dealing with. And many of those cases—they may turn out to be more aggressive than we originally thought they were. So we kind of have to plan for those things in advance.