[Pebbles82]

How long have you had her again? I am just wondering if she needs time to adjust to her new home and owner. Some hamsters will never be fully tame or handleable - especially if they've had a traumatic past or had a bad experience with rough handling - but you can still form a bond of trust and that is important. She will come to learn that you are gentle. I actually think one of ours might have a nip if I tried to cut his nails!

I had a roborovski hamster who developed a lump or two at 18 months and decided against surgery - mainly because I didn't think he would survive due to the location of the lumps and the amount of his body they covered - it would have been fairly drastic surgery.

He lived another six months and then deteriorated to the point where he had to be pts.

It is a very difficult decision and I hope your vet can help with it. A lump/tumour can be removed. But if it has been there a long time and is cancerous it could have spread. That is the difficult decision. A lump could be benign but become cancerous also.

I hope the vet can advise on the correct course of action, but each decision and situation is individual.
At 18 months old though, for a dwarf hamster, I would think if she is not suffering with it, it may be better to let her live out her life.

I would have liked to have surgery on our robo - if the tumours had not covered such a large area of his body. As it is he lived happily (even dragging his lump around) for another six months.

I have known of two year old syrians who have had surgery and gone on to live another few months. But it is a difficult one - she could live until she is two years old without the tumour bothering her much. Or she could pass under the anaesthetic (although I think this is rare). Hamsters don't deal that well with anaesthetics - a slight whiff is ok but the more times they have it the less well they recover from it.

Whatever you decide will be the right decision, but I would base that on what the vet thinks.

The difficult bit is you haven't had her very long and without surgery she may decline quickly due to her age (18 months is fairly old for a russian dwarf hamster - they rarely live past the age of two usually).

Do let us know what the vet thinks.