Squeaky Pieky was spayed this week. We chose to have a laparoscopic spay done and I am VERY pleased with the result. Here is a picture of her incisions less than 24 hours after surgery. She has two incisions, both of which are less than an inch long.
There is no swelling, she hasn’t even looked at them twice and, if you asked Pieka, she was 100% the day after surgery. Having a bald belly is more of an annoyance for her than the incisions!
While she was out, I had them x-ray her hips and elbows. I’m a strong believer in being sure a dog can structurally handle the stress we put on them with jumping, etc. The vet was pleased with the results, said both hips and elbows look just fine. I am trying to decide whether to submit them to OFA for prelims – what do you guys think? The truth is that we selected this vet for his expertise on the laparascopic spay, not the OFAs. I am confident that her hips and elbows would pass nicely with proper x-rays but know that a bad shot can doom a good dog. The positioning for the hips is pretty good but not perfect.
You can see the positioning is slightly off – her leg bone covers more of the bottom of the pelvis one than on the opposite side. The “holes” in the pelvis (bisected by the spine) are pretty close to even, but not perfect.
Here are the elbow x-rays, they look pretty good to me:
Thoughts?
The incisions look fantastic. My comments on the xrays, first is look at all that muscle mass! Second do you think they could have made the positioning any worse? Even so to me all looks very good. But, I just happen to have the worlds expert in reading radiographs right hear in the house. His comment was the elbows are good and the hips are good and then detailed all the various nuances of the incorrect positioning.
@Julie
Julie, I was hoping that Mos would be around to take a look! 😉 I agree with you, though….you can see that they weren’t too careful to get a truly even position. Again, I didn’t pick this vet for the x-rays (obviously). I am leaning towards NOT submitting them to OFA – I would hate for poor positioning to result in a mediocre rating, when I’m confident that she SHOULD pass with flying colors.
Even with the bad positioning those hips look really good! To be honest, I’d probably not submit those to OFA (but Mos would obviously be the person to ask about that). Since the litter is not 2 years old anyway and the hips look so good even with bad positioning, I’d wait until she is old enough for a rating rather than a prelim and send some good rads to OFA for the real rating. Mos did prelims for Nikon and I was confident with his assessment so I did not submit the prelims, just another expense and they don’t get a real rating until 2+ years. Now the dogs are old enough for SV a-stamps (12 months) which I haven’t done yet (sorry Julie!) but maybe will just wait until he is 2 so they can be submitted to the SV and the OFA.