Medical Files: The Curious Case of Kallie
Kallie is a seven-month-old Border Collie. She came to Animal Hospital of Sandy Springs for a routine spay procedure. Prior to her surgery, Kallie’s owners reported no previous medical issues or problems at home.
At Animal Hospital of Sandy Springs, we require pre-anesthetic blood work for all our anesthetic procedures. This allows us to screen for disease processes that may present and complicate anesthesia during surgery. In Kallie’s case, we found abnormal liver values that caused us to postpone her spay procedure and prompted us to investigate the cause of these abnormal values and run further tests.
After running additional tests, we determined that Kallie had an intrahepatic portosystemic shunt which is a condition where the blood vessels and blood bypass the critical detoxification process that occurs in liver. If left untreated (either by medical management or surgical intervention), a liver shunt can lead to seizures, neurological problems (disorientation, staring into space, circling), bladder or kidney stones, chronic vomiting or diarrhea.
In Kallie’s case, we detected this abnormality early and referred her to the University of Florida for further treatment. Without our routine pre-anesthetic blood work, we would not have been able to identify this abnormality which could have lead to serious health complications for Kallie down the road.
Kallie’s case is an excellent example of how important pre-anesthetic bloodwork is for preventing complications during surgery. Regular bloodwork is also important for healthy pets as a preventive diagnostic test to catch any abnormalities early so that treatment plans can be identified, increasing the quality of life and life-span of our pets.
For more information about surgery and other services offered by Animal Hospital if Sandy Springs, please call us at 404-255-8522.
