This week I want to introduce you to Rosie - a very sweet, three-year-old, Wirehaired Hungarian Vizsla.

Rosie’s owner brought her in to see me because a small skin lump had appeared on her chest, the lump was only about an inch across and was not worrying Rosie but was at risk of rubbing on Rosie’s harness and her mum thought it worth checking out.

When I saw the skin lump, I could not say what it was from appearances alone, so Rosie’s owner and I discussed taking a fine needle aspirate (when we take cells with a needle and a cytologist looks at them down a microscope).

The trouble is that Rosie is a bit of a wriggler so we were not convinced we would get a useful diagnostic sample with her conscious.

We therefore opted to anaesthetise Rosie, remove the mass and send it away to the lab for identification. The operation went smoothly, Rosie recovered well and five days later I got the results through saying that this had been a cancerous lump called a Mast Cell Tumour but that we had clear margins when we removed it.

When I phoned Rosie’s owner with the results, she was hugely relieved to find that a potentially nasty cancer had been removed.

She admitted that she had wondered whether to even bring Rosie in to check the lump and had only done so because it was starting to rub against her harness.

When I mentioned that I might write about Rosie this week she was delighted, she wanted me to use Rosie’s case to highlight the fact that no new lump should be ignored – acting sooner rather than later is vital and potentially lifesaving.