Dear Kim: >I hope someone can benefit from this info in the future. Forgive me if >it's boring. I love this stuff! For a pathologist, it is far from boring! It's what I do. If you don't mind, I'd like to give an interpretation here. I don't think we are out of the woods quite yet, and extreme vigilance is important. While it is not a squamous cell carcinoma or a leiomyosarcoma, apocrine tumors in this location are occasionally bad news. Malignant sweat gland tumors can be well-differentiated, and these tumors have a nasty propensity to metastasize early to internal lymph nodes. Personally, I'd rather have the leiomyosarcoma - a malgnancy of the smooth muscle of either blood vessel or urianry tract walls, because they offer the best hope of a surgical cure if they are truly malignant. The fact that the mitotic rate (or the number of cells that are dividing) is up to 3 in some fields is of some concern. I have seen a number of similar tumors, and some have been bad actors. Let me make two suggestions. 1) Keep a very close eye on this lesion - if it turns out to be a malignancy, its not good. In apocrine malignancies of the vulva in the female and prepuce in the male, metastasis often occurs prior to anyone ever seeing the first sign of a problem, and well before surgery. 2) If you can contact your vet and the patholigst, I'd be happy to look at the tumor and see if I can identify as to benign or malignant. I've seen a number of these before. Actually, I've recently started a study on this type of tumor, and one more neoplasm - I've currently got eight in the archive will certainly strength the study. With kindest regards, Bruce Willams, DVM [Posted in FML issue 3297]