Abnormal Heat Cycle in Dogs

Hey, guys, My name is Dr. Lera here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with Lily. Lily is here today because she had started having her period maybe about three weeks ago. And it's usually normal for dogs to have some sort of symptoms of going through what we call a heat cycle or her period. And those symptoms can look like swelling of the mammary glands. They can have a very swollen vulva, and you may even see some bloody discharge from the vulva. Now, mom said that, you know, Lily was doing great and she had had her period for maybe about two or three weeks, and then it stopped. And then all of a sudden, mom said on Sunday she started to notice a lot of bloody discharge again from the vulva. That is not typically normal to see that kind of things. Sometimes you can have a heat cycle or have them show signs of a heat cycle for about four to six weeks, even though that is really outside of the norm. Usually about two to three weeks is what we would consider high end normal. And so we went ahead and we did some blood work on her to see what was going on and did some X rays. Now, the blood work didn't show an increased white blood cell count, which sometimes with dogs who do still have their uterus, we call that intact, and they're going through a heat cycle or a few months after heat cycle. That could be an indication of something called pyometra. We'll talk about that on a different video. But when we did the X rays, we also saw that she had an enlarged uterine body. And so again, the suspicion of a potential pyometra. Now, we did an ultrasound on her this morning, and when we did the ultrasound, it did not look like she had a pyometra. It looked like she had some sort of growth in the uterus. And so we went ahead, we took her to surgery and we removed her ovary and her ovaries and her uterus. And it was something that, you know, what we're going to do now is we're going to send that off to the lab. They're going to check to see if there's any sort of bacteria growing in there. They're also going to check to see what exactly is going on in her uterus and if it's some sort of cancer or if it's just something benign, but was causing that increased amount of bloody discharge that mom had started to notice on Sunday. So typically what we'll do is a patient like this will go ahead, we will discharge them that same night, and they'll be monitored at home, and then we'll follow up with them the following morning, make sure everything went okay. It'll typically take us about four or five days to get some answers about the culture results, which is where the lab checks for bacteria. And it's going to take us about 7 to 10 days to go ahead and get results on that uterus and what exactly was going on. So if you guys have any questions about this particular topic, leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share. Thanks for watching. Have a great day and look forward to the update on Lily and how she's doing.