When our primary care vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, was here last Monday to do the annual exams and vaccinations on everyone, she detected a heart murmur in Widget and recommended we get an echocardiogram done. So when I went to Missoula last Friday to pick up blind Rosie from her colic surgery hospitalization, I took Widget along so our internal medicine specialist there, Dr. Dave Bostwick, could do the echo. While we were at it, I asked him to do an abdominal ultrasound, chest X-rays, bloodwork and urinalysis. In other words, we wanted to have all her systems checked out. She's now at that age — about 8 years old — where we really start worrying that we'll miss something and not catch it in time.
In the photo above, Dave is doing the echocardiogram of her heart. It turns out she has mitral valve regurgitation, but at this point it's not significant and doesn't require any medications. It is something we'll need to have rechecked every 6 to 12 months, though.
Her chest X-rays looked fine.
On the abdominal ultrasound, however, Dave found some nonspecific spots on her kidneys that would have required the urinalysis any way to see if kidney function was becoming impaired. The BUN and creatinine kidney values that are analyzed from the blood work don't typically show any changes until something like 75% of the kidney function is already lost … so by the time you see changes in the BUN and creatinine, you're already in trouble. The urinalysis can give you an early look at kidney function.
This afternoon Dave called with the results, and we were relieved at the news: All of her lab tests looked great! Nice job, Widget!
—
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