Joey’s Pet of the Week – Hugo Gets the Snip

By Scott Lackenby | Dated May 3, 2017

Heya gang! How are you all?? Struggling through a full week after all those Public Holidays?? It’s been tough, hasn’t it? I have been busy this week working on my submission for the Dermcare Clinic Cat of the Year award. I am SUPER confident that I’ll be crowned the winner this time. I even had a bath in preparation for my profile pic. I’ll let you all know once it’s been submitted so you can all vote for me.

Nurse Janie and Nurse Nicole seemed to be enjoying my bath a little more than me….

My star this week is the handsome Hugo, a 5month old Ragdoll cross from St Ives who came in to be desexed. An extremely routine surgery and one we perform multiple times a week. Regardless of how routine the surgery is, we will offer to run a pre-anaesthetic blood screen on your animal. There are two reasons for this. For healthy young animals, we are not expecting to find any abnormalities. But it does give us a good baseline to work off should that pet need to have their bloods re-run if they become unwell. Secondly, sometimes we find things on the blood test that we may not have diagnosed until much later. This was the case with Hugo. His pre-anaesthetic blood screen showed a mild elevation in his urea level and his creatinine levels were in the upper level of normal. SO what does this mean? Well, urea is the waste product from the breakdown of proteins. An elevation of urea combined with a slightly high level of creatinine could indicate that Hugo has pre-renal disease. The kidneys work a little harder than normal during an anaesthetic, even a short one like Hugo was about to have, so Dr Helen Burns had to slightly adapt the anaesthetic procedure for Hugo. He was given IV fluids to help support his kidneys both during and after the procedure, and he was given a very low dose of anti-inflammatories on recovery, as these drugs can negatively impact kidney function.

Handsome Hugo all rugged up in recovery

Dr Helen spoke to Hugo’s Mum on discharge about his blood tests. We aren’t stressing about his blood tests for now, but we will re-test his blood in 2weeks to see if there have been any changes. I’ll keep you posted once Hugo has been back to have his blood re-tested. The big take home message from Hugo’s story?? Pre-anaesthetic blood tests are definitely something to consider if your pet is having an anaesthetic. While in most cases we find nothing of concern, we do on occasion, find something that if left untreated, could be a potentially life threatening issue.

Well, better go. I have to work on the written component of my Clinic Cat of the Year submission. Meows for now, love Joey xox