Part 1 of 6
Learn what to expect from a dog pregnancy ultrasound in this guide featuring insights from this 6 part Breeding Masterclass with expert Dr. Andrea Hesser.
Transcript
0:00
Sorry for the fake out.
0:02
I know they were saying that that it was announced that we were going to be having the class and I was really excited about it and I was really convinced that my dog was resorbing.
0:10
And this is a great example of a don't be your own dog's vet sometimes, right?
0:16
I was trying to get the information a little bit ahead of schedule because we knew we were going to have this, the first ultrasound would be pretty early and things.
0:25
And I think, you know, sometimes, I think sometimes you can have a variance in the way that your ultrasound might come out.
0:32
You guys have probably experienced that yourself depending on where you where you have gone with your dogs for ultrasounds and such.
0:40
All right, So what we're just going to do a little quick overview.
0:42
I just wanted to throw a couple slides up so that you guys kind of knew where we were and kind of what my brain was doing a couple weeks ago and where she's been already.
0:50
So this is just an overview.
0:52
I know you guys, I think have this list from one of the promotional kind of guides that was sent out.
0:58
This is kind of what to expect.
1:00
Her due date is March 13th ±2 days.
1:03
I'm going to start checking her on the 11th for an elective C-section is my plan for her.
1:10
And then we'll have several weeks where we're talking about puppies in different regards.
1:14
So that will be all kind of different angles for what you might be thinking about at different ages of pregnancy, and after she's delivered.
1:26
So just a little bit, hold on just a second, stay.
1:29
She's right next to me and she's very needy, right?
1:31
I have her like perfectly in position so we can ultrasound.
1:34
But first of all, all right, so Cabana is, is my personal dog.
1:39
She's a three-year old bull mastiff.
1:41
She's almost 4. She’ll be 4 in May.
1:43
She's never been bred.
1:44
She's amazing.
1:45
And she does have some cycle variants.
1:47
So I was waiting for her quite a bit to come in season in the fall time.
1:52
She could have come in anytime.
1:53
We didn't, she didn't come in season until the end of December.
1:57
So first day of heat was at the end of December on the 28th, just kind of right after I got back from from a Christmas visit to Chicago.
2:05
And then she had her LH surge approximately January 7th.
2:09
I did not test her LH specifically, just inferred it based on her timing.
2:15
But she had a really smooth ovulation curve.
2:17
This is her pictured on her first TCI day with her one of those semen transport tanks.
2:24
So this is her with her boyfriend.
2:26
She spread with frozen semen on the 23rd and 24th, which was five and six days post LH.
2:34
Semen looked really good the first day.
2:35
Second day it was OK.
2:37
It wasn't as good the second day.
2:39
Really happy with it the first day.
2:41
And we did breed her on a weekend in a snowstorm.
2:45
My progesterone samples were lost.
2:46
So like, you know, everything that could go wrong went wrong.
2:49
But fortunately the good the things that were really important were under control.
2:54
So the semen went pretty well.
2:56
I had the semen right and I was able to get her bred despite it being on a Sunday.
3:02
I fortunately have staff that's willing to come in to meet me up there.
3:06
So able to breed her kind of precisely when she needs to be frozen and so specific.
3:10
I think it can be kind of tough with that with depending on your circumstance.
3:14
OK, so some mentions of her early care.
3:18
So, you know what I chose to do.
3:20
She got when she was early, like when she was in the season but had not ovulated yet.
3:27
I gave her three days of panacur.
3:31
And I live in Texas.
3:33
I think most parts of the United States, even if you don't live in an endemically wormy area of the country that's moist and warm all the time, even if your dogs come from locations or have some ancestry, they can actually pass insisted oh, like Osis and early stages of parasites from mother to baby and then that baby could never actually shed and could have insisted migratory type larval situations too.
4:01
So it's a good idea no matter where you live.
4:03
I think for many of us, we breed across the country with a lot of different dogs and backgrounds.
4:07
So it could be that, you know, it's a good measure for you even if you're not from where I'm from. She eats sensitive skin and stomach pro plan.
4:16
I feed her the puppy one because it's the most similar to the original sensitive skin and stomach performance type food.
4:25
They don't have that specific one anymore.
4:27
They kind of shifted to puppy versus adult, but she's already on the puppy.
4:31
I like her coat a little bit better on it and she's she can be a little bit chicken allergic so she's always been on that one.
4:36
It is well balanced for pregnancy.
4:38
So it worked out pretty nicely for that.
4:40
So I didn't change anything about her food.
4:42
I didn't change how much anything of that sort.
4:45
I did start her on some salmon oil and probiotics, which is not part of her usual regimen.
4:49
Could be, but I just don't tend to.
4:51
I'm kind of a leftist one person for a lot of things and I've been really tense about your claims because I just don't want her to get an ear infection while she's pregnant.
4:59
Her manifestation if she does get into another dog's food and it is chicken based, she tends to break with an ear infection.
5:05
So I've just been trying to be very aware and cautious of that and using ear cleansers when I give her a bath, just FYI.
5:15
So she's she really had no changes with early pregnancy.
5:18
She had no appetite changes, never nauseous, no attitude.
5:22
Attitude changes, she runs agility and she had no changes to anything that she was doing.
5:28
She was drinking more water.
5:29
So that was really the only note that I can tell you that she did.
5:33
But I do think she had, I'll shoot some pictures.
5:35
I think she had a positive flank sign when she was three weeks and a positive nipple change at two to three weeks and that's post LH, not post breeding.
5:44
So within a week or two I could see some of these types of changes and felt pretty confident she was pregnant.
5:50
I was just worried about the health of the pregnancy so I'll go into that a little bit.
5:53
But no weight gain between the TCI and her ultrasound date.
5:58
This is what I'm talking about like when I talk about kind of flank sign.
6:02
So it's tough to see in a smoother coated dog.
6:05
It's easier in a like in a coated breed because sometimes the hair starts to flip the wrong direction.
6:11
But her basically her like last rib area will just look kind of wide and sometimes I'd see something that wasn't normally there is the best way to say it.
6:22
And she had a pretty good nipple sign.
6:23
I mean, right away, she's always had kind of prominent nipples so not mammary glands, but just the nipples themselves.
6:29
And so I felt pretty good about that as well.
6:32
So when we were planning on our first kind of visit there it is possible to ultrasound a whole week before when we were going to, I started to check her that week.
6:44
I happened to, you know, have access to ultrasounds, so I did this earlier than I would typically check for a client, but I could see positive signs of pregnancy on our first ultrasound.
6:54
The problem was by the end of the week, so the Friday before the Tuesday when we were going to start this ultrasound series, so she, they didn't look healthy.
7:05
So the vesicles themselves.
7:08
So vesicles just mean it's a circle with a black fluid in it and it doesn't have a puppy in it yet.
7:15
We didn't have the forward movement that I would have expected between kind of the early week and then the later week.
7:23
And a lot of times when that is happening, it's actually, if you see a resorption fight as well, it's a red flag.
7:30
It was bred with frozen semen, also a red flag for possible resorption and it's more common to do so when they're when they are bred with frozen.
7:39
So I was worried that we'd show up with our first ultrasound visit and that we wouldn't have anything to show you guys.
7:45
So we skipped that week for that reason.
7:48
And I just told them, you know, let me just watch her and see what she does.
7:51
And if she pulled her pregnancy and everything's healthy, then we can go ahead and pick up in a couple weeks.
7:56
So that was kind of the thought behind it.
7:59
And then when I was rechecking her a little bit later, she had three fetuses that I could tell.
8:06
I'm pretty confident at four.
8:09
Now they're big enough that we can't really pick them apart as easily because they kind of all pick up the same area.
8:15
But she looks healthy.
8:16
Her progesterone was nice and high.
8:18
She didn't have anything wrong with her blood work.
8:20
So there wasn't really any reason to be concerned at this point.
8:22
They've been growing consistently, no new issues.
8:25
So that's to show you what that would look like.
8:27
So on the left is a small vesicle, the smaller kind of sized vesicles.
8:34
You'll see the black bladder at the kind of the top on the right or the left image.
8:38
That's kind of the triangular black shape.
8:40
And then the two smaller circles are pregnancies.
8:44
So the idea is that if they look like that, it's OK when it's super early, but they should look like the picture on the right two or three days later, they almost always will look like that image on the right by the time they're at 28 days or so gestation, which is kind of where she lives such a ham right now.
9:07
So it just so happened today, I just so happened to have a colleague that spayed a incidentally pregnant dog that was here for routine spay from a rescue.
9:16
And I just wanted to show you this is kind of how little things are.
9:18
So that's a 4 by 4 centimeter gauze fund that we used to surgery and the little kind of swellings are on the uterus there.
9:31
I opened one up on the right image so you guys can kind of see how teeny tiny things are.
9:36
This is about this dog was probably between 28 and 30 days gestation from LH.
9:41
So this is kind of where we were initially going to be looking at pregnancy.
9:46
Now they're probably twice to three times that size roughly in size.
9:51
So just so you know, so the machine that I'll be using for these couple of texts, this is actually a machine that some owners will have. It’s called the butterfly.
10:01
You can actually adjust to a phone.
10:05
We have it connected to an iPad, but just, you know, FYI, and she's about six weeks right now.
10:11
So again, her due date is March 13th.
10:13
The next time we see you, after we do our ultrasound today, we're going to do another ultrasound just for fun.
10:20
I'm going to just go ahead and have her X-rays done so that we can kind of fill and tell she doesn't need X-rays since he's having a C section.
10:29
But I just think for education reasons, it would be nice for you guys to be able to see what that would look like comparatively at that time.
10:35
So without further ado, stop.
10:41
She's being so naughty.
10:42
She knows that I'm on camera here.
10:46
OK, So you should be seeing my body.
10:48
If anybody could confirm that, that would be groovy.
10:52
All right, what I'm going to do, I'm going to just send your ultrasound up here so you guys can see and then I'm hoping we can do a little show and tell.
11:04
OK, So if we go back here, so she is on our right side and basically what we're looking at are our gestational sacs.
11:12
So this is one sac and you can see, you can actually kind of see the margins of her placenta kind of in that banded fashion.
11:19
So this is own area placenta and then that fetus is basically lying on its side.
11:23
So you can see the head to the left of your screen and then the thorax kind of more centrally and then comes back to having, oh, he's moving with me.
11:39
So the fun thing about ultrasounding at this stage, they do tend to kind of feel pressure and they tend to kind of move around on us sometimes.
11:47
Sometimes they move completely away.
11:51
And this particular ultrasound doesn't have a lot of strength.
11:55
So you can see it just kind of wiggle there.
11:58
This particular ultrasound doesn't have a lot of strength and measuring like it can't show Doppler, which means we can't show blood flow in and out of the heart.
12:07
But it can definitely show a lot of good contrast.
12:10
You can see heartbeats.
12:11
I know it's probably a little bit more challenging just because you guys are at a distance from, I mean like your distance from the screen.
12:19
The screen's got to kind of have like communicate technologically and that it's projecting an image.
12:25
I'm sure it's a little bit grainier on your end.
12:27
So that's a head looking at you and two little feet in that gestational sac and his body kind of comes away that way.
12:34
Stay Cabana, let me see if I can get him in another slice, but I basically at this stage you can see they kind of compete for space right, So I can see in some views I can see more than one right, So I know it's more than one.
12:46
If I was checking her for the very first time, that's probably the best I could say other than, you know, these guys are over here.
12:55
And then if I go down here, I have a different one over here.
13:01
So and then like in this shot, you can see three in one shot, right?
13:06
So there's some that you can infer.
13:08
It does get tricky when they're this far out.
13:10
I like to count whenever I'm counting.
13:11
I like to count a week or two ago for counts, personally.
13:16
There are some practitioners that are not going to be as comfortable with counts and that's OK.
13:19
They might just say like there's a lot or there's a few or there's just one.
13:24
I think one is, I hate to say one is really easy because if you don't see anything else, you know that that's it.
13:34
Cabana. Now hold on just a second, guys.
13:36
We're done.
13:37
Thank you.
13:39
She's a very good girl.
13:40
She's hanging here with no restraint because she's just perfect.
13:47
OK, now we're back.
13:49
So while I continue to kind of roll around in here, do you guys want to field any questions?
13:55
If anybody has any questions about the timeline, I know we're probably up with our 10-15 minute window now.
14:02
Yeah, this was so great.
14:03
We do have quite, quite a few questions, but I will do my best to just select a few.
14:08
And just a reminder to everyone, we're gonna be doing this for many, many weeks, so there'll be plenty of times for questions.
14:16
Someone was curious when you would say is the best time for an ultrasound to confirm pregnancy, given that not every vet has the most high tech equipment.
14:25
And that's a wonderful question and I think so well illustrated by this exact situation that I was in, right?
14:32
So I was using an ultrasound that was a little bit more middle of the road.
14:36
It's not a super high end ultrasound.
14:39
And I think I convinced myself there was more issue than there was because I was pushing the limit on my timeline.
14:45
So I think 28 days is my favorite day.
14:49
That is my favorite between 28 and I would say 30.
14:53
I think if you push before that, sometimes it's useful if you're trying to catch what they're doing and why they resorbed and prove that they’ve resorbed.
15:04
But I would say for most people, it's more in practical to check them when we know we're kind of past the window of concern.
15:15
So I think that time frame is good if you don't have kind of known ovulation timing.
15:22
Sometimes we don't have the ability or maybe the time like in my case, you know, my progesterone got lost in FedEx.
15:30
I think sometimes 4 weeks from breeding.
15:34
For most breeding types, if it's frozen semen, we know we're breeding kind of late.
15:38
It might be a little different for frozen semen, but for most other types of semen, fresh semen, natural breeding, etcetera, I think four, sometimes a little bit earlier is possible, but four weeks from then is reasonable as well that you know that you're going to see pregnancy on the ultrasound.
