Hi! Pippin here, soon to be known as Pippin the Bald. I’d rather be Pippin the Bold, but there you go.

I went to see Dr Rebekah again on Friday. She sent me to sleep while she took some blood for those tests, but I sort of woke up while she was doing the X-rays. She sent me back to sleep, but I woke up again when she was doing the MRI scan, and she only got part of it, because she didn’t want to send me back to sleep in case I didn’t wake up. She told Mummy I am ‘unstable during anaesthesia’. That means if I need surgery, I might wake up in the middle of it, so she would advise against it.

But what the tests showed was I had too much oestrogen in my body, so my hair was falling out. It does the same with cats and dogs. Apparently with you humans your hair falls out with too little oestrogen.

The extra oestrogen is coming from some cells in my left testicle, which shouldn’t be doing that, but are being made by some cancer cells called Sir Toeless (sertoli, mummy said). And they’ll just continue doing it, and eventually send cancer cells around my body, unless I have my testicles removed. That means surgery.

And I don’t do surgery because of the anaesthetic thing.

So Mummy says we’ll just keep going and enjoying life, until it seems like I’m not.

Like Victor? I asked her.

Yes, she said. But you won’t get a nasty lump like he did, well you might find it gets tricky walking, but we’ll just see how it goes.

That’s what she said, so I’ll just carry on as normal, and take my meds for the arthritis and for the bladder stones.

And meanwhile, I enjoy anything I can find in the garden runs, because Mummy moved them yesterday. It’s going to be hot and dry again this week. Same old story. But there’s a little patch of something in my run that nobody’s eaten yet. That’s for this afternoon. Ronnie and Reggie have finally decided that trefoil leaves are quite nice, which is good, because they’ve got a nice patch of them where they are now. And we get lots of blue butterflies coming to them. And the hummingbird moth every afternoon, and painted ladies, and a comma, which Mummy hadn’t seen since the spring, but I put one just before I put ‘but’. Hee-hee! Oh, and I had a bath on Wednesday. My coat feels lovely and soft.

Keep well, and keep out of the sun…

love

Pippin xxx