GROSS ALERT ~ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SEE BLOOD AND PUSS DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.

December 13th we did a surgical ai breeding with Glory if you missed reading part 1 of this series you can read about it here. In part 1 I talked about the surgical ai procedure. The procedure went great, no problems at all with anesthetic, her uterus looked great, no cysts on ovaries, I couldn’t of asked for a better outcome. The problem arose about a week after surgery. Each day after the surgery I checked Glory’s incision site to make sure it was healing properly. You want to check each day for swelling, draining and redness, none of which should be happening. With Glory’s last surgical ai she encountered some swelling on the incision which was self induced mainly because of me, I let her do more activity than she should of so she got a seroma (fluid under the skin), so when she developed a swelling I assumed it was another seroma. It wasn’t until a week later the swelling got really big, hard and she stopped eating. It was at that time I realized this was not a seroma and something was wrong with Glory and she needed to be checked out.

The swelling was the whole length of this arrow.

The swelling when large was right next to the incision between her mammary glands. Her surgical incision continued to look good. When I took her with me to work I had the doctor working that day take a look at Glory. She decided to do a fine needle aspirate which means she would insert a needle into the hard lump and remove some cells or in this case she removed a 3cc syringe full of nasty looking fluid.

Nasty colored fluid.

Once the fluid was out it was time to make a slide of the fluid, stain it and then look at it under the microscope to see what we were dealing with.

Microscope slide of fluid.

The fluid was full of white blood cells (large purple colored segmented cells) and bacteria (small pin point dots) which consisted of cocci. It was basically a syringe full of puss/infection. The white blood cells were in that area trying to clean up an infection. I sent the fluid to the laboratory to have them culture it and tell us what type of bacteria was in the fluid and what antibiotic would treat the infection.

This abscess needed to be drained. It was on the verge of bursting on it’s own, in order for this infection to heal we needed to do another surgical procedure to open up the abscess, drain it, flush it out with an antibiotic solution and then put a drain in the area so the infection would continue to drain. This all meant Glory would need to be sedated to perform this procedure. This was worry some because we had just bred Glory a week ago. Would sedating her affect the pregnancy, would this infection affect the pregnancy, would antibiotics afterwards affect this pregnancy? Each and everyone of those questions could of course affect the pregnancy but it was a procedure that needed to be done. The only saving grace if there was any is that Glory’s eggs were just floating around in her uterus, they were not attached at this time so they were not getting a blood supply that would have medication in it yet.

Making an opening and draining the puss out.

The doctor chose sedation medication that would lightly sedate her and in hopes she could get the procedure done quickly. I held Glory during the whole procedure. The doctor made an incision and drained the puss out, her mammary tissue quickly deflated. Once everything was drained out she flushed the abscess with an antibiotic solution and inserted a drain in her mammary gland so the infection could continue to drain out.

Drain to let the remaining infection drain out.

Another saving grace during this procedure was that the infection was in the subcutaneous layer of her abdomen and it did not extend into the abdominal cavity. The worry some part now was would this drain affect her mammary development during the pregnancy and would she develop mastitis while nursing from these mammary glands. The most caudal mammary glands are the biggest and supply the most milk we didn’t want anything to happen to these during surgery.  Glory was put on a high dose of antibiotic which was safe for pregnant bitches. She needed to take a tablet by mouth twice a day for two weeks.

Ultrasound to check for a pyometra.

That evening I took Glory in for a ultrasound on her uterus, I wanted to make sure the infection was just near her incision and not in her uterus which would be a pyometra. The ultrasound was negative for a pyometra but that didn’t mean she was out of the woods yet as she could still develop one.

Another abscess came about.

Two days after her drain placement she developed another abscess. In the picture above you can see a swelling and a read area, that is another abscess that was on the verge of breaking open. In the lower photo you can see the puss coming out after I poked it with a needle.

Puss coming out.

Discharge from her vagina.

Glory also had discharge from her vagina, I was really concerned now that she might be experiencing an pyometra so off to the vet we went again to have another ultrasound done to make sure she was ok. The doctor examined the abscess and said since it was draining and she was already on antibiotics he wasn’t going to put another drain in, I needed to keep doing warm compresses on the swelling and squeeze out what I could of the infection, so I continued to do this until the following Monday when the drain could come out. The ultrasound was again negative for a pyometra, the doctor said she was showing signs of a metritis.

Removal of the drain.

5 days post drain placement the drain could be removed. You only want to keep a drain in place for 3-5 days so on the 5th day I removed the drain. The hole would stay open and close on it’s own. I continued to warm compress and squeeze out what I could from the other abscess.

Glory was a trooper through this whole ordeal, she left her drain alone, took her antibiotics like a champ, continued to eat and laid still while I did the warm compresses, she didn’t even mind me taking her temperature twice a day. She handled this so much better than I did as all I could think about is that I did this to her because I wanted to do the surgical ai. It was too early in the pregnancy to know if she took or not so all I could think about too was that she isn’t gonna take with all that was going on with her. The doctor said she had a 50/50 chance of becoming pregnant that he has seen this type of infection happen a handful of times before and some took and some didn’t take. It is believed that she had an reaction to the extender that was in the semen sample and when the semen was being placed into her uterus some of it aerosolized and landed on the subcutaneous layer of her abdomen and she reacted to it. The culture that I had sent to the laboratory was negative so it was either a sterile infection or the bacteria needed a different culture media to grow on. Whatever the case after two weeks of antibiotics all the incisions look great and Glory is back to normal. Now we wait another two weeks before we can ultrasound her and see if the pregnancy took.