In House Bloodwork

Chemistry and hematology blood tests provide a detailed look at your pet’s health. There are many conditions that cannot be diagnosed by looking, listening, and touching. Routine blood test can provide useful indicators of the function and health of your pet’s organ systems.

Pre-Surgical Bloodwork

Why we recommend pre-anesthetic health screening: The use of sedatives and general anesthesia for procedures is common and considered safe, but there are potential risks even for a young, healthy animal. Age, pre-existing medical conditions and the stress of surgery and anesthesia increase the risk of complications. Therefore, knowledge of a patient's complete health status prior to any procedure requiring sedation or anesthesia is not just good medicine, it is critical to help ensure a successful outcome. Identifying underlying conditions will enable your veterinarian to select the best combination of drugs, fluid therapy, and monitoring tools ultimately reducing the risk of complications to your pet.

Mini panel/Prescreen: The mini-panel/prescreen gives us a brief look at kidney and liver health to determine if the patient needs further evaluation prior to anesthesia. The prescreen also lets us check to make sure the patient is well hydrated and to determine whether there is any evidence of infection or other illnesses that are not obvious on physical exam. It allows a more thorough assessment than a physical exam alone and reduces anesthetic risk.

Full CBC/Panel: The full CBC/Panel lets us evaluate major organ health more completely including multiple tests to evaluate kidney and liver function. It also allows us to further evaluate the patient for other diseases of the pancreas, adrenal gland, and many other conditions which we cannot evaluate with a mini panel.  The full panel gives us a much more complete evaluation of the patient's overall health and helps us see conditions which could compromise the patient while under anesthesia or could need further evaluation prior to anesthesia.

Our chemistry machine is an Abaxis VetScan VS 2 and our Hematology machine is a Heska Hematrue. If you would like to know more about these machines please visit the Abaxis or Heska websites.