Fever in Dogs

Hey, guys. Dr. Lara here today. I'm here with Cisco. Cisco is a 14 week old puppy and he's coming in today for his puppy visit. So what that includes is typically a distemper parvo vaccine, some sort of dewormer, and or collecting a fecal sample. Now, whenever we administer vaccines, we always check the temperature as well. Whenever patients are coming in and they're not feeling well. Today his temperature registered at 103.1. And so that's what we're going to be talking about in the video today are fevers or elevated temperatures. All right, so with Cisco, what? When we have patients that have elevated temperatures, at least with Cisco in this particular scenario, you might notice that Cisco might be a little nervous. If you notice him trembling, he's not maybe looking directly at Abraham. Those can be indications that the dogs are nervous. And so sometimes that can be one of the reasons that we might have an elevated temperature. The other reason that we can have an elevated temperature in a puppy is if they're super excited and they're jumping around and they're acting like maniacs. Those are totally normal and totally okay. But we can also have elevations in temperature if we have some sort of illness. Like if, God forbid, we were to have some sort of cancer. If you have a really bad kidney infection, that could be something else that could be causing a fever. If they have pancreatitis, that could be something that could be causing a fever. And also, even if they're having some sort of, like, GI upset, you know, whether it's vomiting, diarrhea, whatever, those are just some of the most common things that can actually cause a fever. When, you know, when you have patients that are coming to the now, the next thing is going ahead and figuring out, okay, well, we have a fever. What do we do next? So now we go ahead and look at. Okay, well, he is a puppy. So I go ahead and I collected the history, I did my physical exam on him, felt his lymph nodes and all those kinds of things. And I talked to mom, and mom said he seems to be acting fine. Humberta, that's Bert. She's one of our team members here. I'm gonna have her go ahead and get Cisco just because Cisco's a little nervous. So you'll know she'll be coming into the video short. But going back to, you know, one of the things that mom said was that he was acting totally fine. And so my recommendation is that you go ahead and, you know, depending on, you know, people's schedule and that kind of stuff. You can go ahead. There we go. There we go. All right. You can go ahead and either a, if there's no rush to give the vaccine, you can recheck the temperature within few days, or if you feel comfortable at home, you can check the temperature at home. Now, the catch is, how do we check the temperature? We check the temperature by sticking a thermometer in the butt. Some people are not comfortable with that. And, you know, they have the ear. The ear thermometers. And so it is something that you do have to get used to. I know with my kids, whenever we check the ear thermometer is not what we call a core temperature. So you'd have to add another degree on top of that so that you actually have an idea of what the temperature, true temperature may actually be. The other option is going ahead. And some people might say, you know what, the dog's been acting fine. I'm not really concerned the dog is acting like a nut job or the dog was super nervous on the car right here, and we need to go ahead and give the vaccine. So we'll go ahead and give the vaccine. The majority of the time, the dogs are probably going to be fine as long as they don't have a history of acting sick or anything like that. The next thing is, if you're bringing your dog in and they have a fever and it's not a puppy visit and they have been acting sick, then we want to look into potentially going ahead and doing some blood work and potentially X rays, the blood work. We would be looking to see if we have any elevations in white blood cell counts, a drop in red blood cell counts, issues with the platelets. We have some changes in the kidney values, liver values, something called the globulin. These are going to be indications to us that there is something that's going on that's causing this particular symptom, which is the fever. And most likely, like I said, we will look at doing X rays. The X rays, depending on what the symptoms are. If the patient's coughing, we're going to want to do X rays of the chest. If the patient's having some sort of vomiting, diarrhea, those kinds of things are general, just not feeling well. The abdomen is going to be an area where we can find more issues that could potentially be causing a fever than the chest. The reason being is because you have more organs in the. In the abdomen. And that is, you know, whether it's the kidney, the liver, the pancreas, the bladder, the intestines There are a lot of things going on in the abdomen compared to the chest. So if we have to choose between chest X rays and abdominal films, we're probably going to look at doing the abdominal films and that's typically where we'll start off. Then depending on what those results give us back and what the symptoms the patient is suffering from, we will go ahead and use that to guide our treatment plan as well as going ahead and our, you know, our plan for further testing. Now, you may ask, do we need to give it a medication for the fever? Normally it's going to depend on the patient, but a lot of the times I'm going to want to try and see if we can find the cause of the fever or at least rule out some major things. So that way we're not necessarily masking signs of a more serious disease that could potentially be going on and maybe even getting worse while we wait for those anti inflammatories or those fever reducing medications to wear off. All right, so we went ahead and talked about why Cisco came in today. We talked about some of the different testing that we would do. We talked about whether or not we would give some medications. And that's pretty much it. If you guys have any questions about this video, please leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. It really helps if you guys subscribe and if you can share it with somebody. Thanks for watching. Have a great day and be safe. Sam.