Questions about an older dog.

Dr. Marie replied:

Hi there and thanks for your question! Here are my answers for you:
1) I would definitely advise her to be spayed. As she gets older, if she is not spayed she is at risk for pyometra which is a life threatening infection in her uterus. Spaying her will also remove the risk of uterine or ovarian cancer. I have no concerns about anesthetic risk in a 5 year old dog as long as her bloodwork is good.

2) In our practice I find most pets don't need an elizabethan collar after surgery, so if she is not bothering with her incision she may not need one. You can possibly also put a baby t-shirt on her to stop her from being able to get to her incision.

3) Regarding the blood check, if your vet is able to run bloodwork in their clinic then it is perfectly ok to do it at the same time as the spay. If they have to send it out to another lab then you may need to have it done a day or two before the surgery. The bloodwork is to tell us that her organs are healthy enough to undergo an anesthetic. I don't usually vaccinate at the same time as a spay simply because I feel that this is a lot for the immune system to handle. However, if your vet feels comfortable with this then it should be ok. Personally, I would rather do the vaccines first, then wait a week and then do the surgery. If you do this then you can do the bloodwork with her vaccine visit.

4) It certainly won't hurt to give the rabies again now. I can see your vet's point. If we wait till November, then she will be due for rabies every November and then the rest of her vaccines every April and you will always have 2 visits each year. This way, you can just come in in April each year.

I hope that helps! Let me know if you have more concerns!

Dr. Marie.


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Dr. Marie replied:

You're ver welcome!

If you are worried about the amount of blood that is taken it really is not a concern and won't affect Rainbow at all.

It sounds like your vet clinic is very much like ours. We can run a few tests here, but for more tests we need to send blood to the lab. There are a variety of different tests we can do but for a young healthy dog I generally do what is called a preanesthetic screen which includes a couple of kidney enzymes, a couple of liver enzymes, blood sugar and a CBC (to look at red and white blood cells).

Sometimes for a middle to older aged dog I will do a more complete profile that runs the above values plus a few more tests. At 5 I would likely do the abbreviated version unless I was suspecting a health concern.

Hope that helps!
Have a wonderful day!
Dr. Marie.