The cat who grew horns

As odd as that title sounds....that is exactly what happened to my cat. And before you ask, no, i don't have any pictures of the horns, they were small and painful and you wouldn't have been able to tell what they were.

A couple of days ago i noticed Rook (the cat) had some wounds on his head, they had something protruding from them and i assumed they were foxtails, he gets those often. So I got all ready to pull them out like i usually do, with hydrogen peroxide to clean the wound and tweezers to get them out. However, when it finally came down to it, they wouldn't budge, not an inch, and they were hard, not at all like a foxtail. So I called the vet right away and they got me in right then (love my vet by the way!!!). The vet tried to pull them out, similar to what i did, and because they were hard and wouldn't move he said maybe it was from a fight and it was another cat's tooth, or claw maybe (because that's how hard it was.) He said to bring him in the next day to have them surgically removed.

The next day i brought Rook in for his surgery and they told me to pick him up in the afternoon. I got a shock when i picked him up and talked to the vet. He said they were not a foreign body at all, they were actually growing out of the cat, he said he had to look it up because he'd never really seen something like that. They're called Horn Cysts. They call it a cyst to give some sort of a reason why a cat would grow a horn where there clearly is no reason to. The tissue mutates and grows a horn, much like cancerous cells simply mutate and grow cancer (thankfully the horns were not cancer). Nobody knows why a cat would grow a horn, let alone two, but he said if not removed they would have kept growing and could have invaded his brain or glands. And while having a cat with horns could have been cool, having a cat who is not in pain or danger is more important, i mean he wouldn't be able to play monopoly with us if he were in pain or impared...... oh have i not told you that he plays monopoly? Well that's another blog all together, and while you may not have believed that my cat can play monopoly maybe now you will, after all what's weirder: a cat who plays monopoly or a cat who grew horns? He does both! He is a rare one indeed :)