Cysts and removal

[Sdel]

What am I looking at here? It’s about the size of a tick with quite a bit more under the skin. It’s not too deep since I can get my fingers under it. It’s in the middle of my mare’s back, two inches off her spine, right where the saddle sits. The top kind of looks and feels like a chestnut. Her back shape has changed a bit so we removed some of the padding and it must have rubbed it. The normal skin has pulled away and this spot is kind of sticking up like a pumpkin stem.

How problematic is removal going to be?

[luvmyhackney]

That looks like a sarcoid to me, but hard to tell from a flat photo.

[NancyM]

It does look like a sarcoid to me too. Your vet will have an opinion on whether it is a sarcoid or a cyst, and will be able to take care of it (remove it) one way or the other.

[cutter99]

Sarcoid. Call your vet.

[OzarksRider]

My horse had 2 nodules that looked like the one in OP’s photo. They were located on his chest, close to where his foreleg joins the chest. They were small (about 1/4 - 3/8" in diameter) and did not appear to be growing. One was protruding through the skin and the other looked like it was beginning to protrude. They were attached to the skin but freely movable under the skin and not attached to underlying tissue. The skin over the protruding nodule was flaking and scaly. I thought maybe sarcoid, vet thought abnormal reaction to insect bite. Vet excised the protruding nodule and sent it off to the vet school for a pathology exam. The report said “suggestive of sarcoid,” but it wasn’t definitive. I kept an eye on the second lesion over the winter and by this spring I thought it was beginning to grow a little, so I took the horse to the vet to have it removed. The vet banded the nodule and it fell off a few weeks later, so there was no pathology report. So far I haven’t seen any sign of recurrence of either nodule. Bottom line–we’ll never know for sure what those nodules were. The vet still thinks they were probably granulomas from insect bites, and I definitely remember picking off a tick where one nodule was. But I still wonder about that pathology report. I guess it will just have to be one of life’s mysteries.

[Sdel]

@OzarksRider

The vet still thinks they were probably granulomas from insect bites, and I definitely remember picking off a tick where one nodule was.

I think it is this, or some kind of sebaceous cyst. I do remember picking off a tick in this general vicinity and there was a thickening then. I have also picked off the top of this thing once before and used drawing salve to get some pus out from inside. But, it’s back….

I looked at it today and it already seems to be seated back into it’s hole and the skin healing back to the core. It doesn’t stick out normally, just sits like a scab, and it doesn’t seem to grow.