A high red blood cell count reads like a surplus. More cells, more oxygen carried, nothing obviously broken. Most of the time that is not what the number means. The red cells are usually the same red cells that were there last month, sitting in less fluid, so more of them turn up in every […]
Read Post »Anemia is one finding that splits in two the moment anyone looks closer. There are fewer red blood cells than there should be, that much the printout settles, but the bone marrow is either scrambling to replace them or it is not, and nearly everything that follows depends on which of those is true. Anemia […]
Read Post »A low white blood cell count on a dog’s bloodwork reads as though the immune system has been switched off. It has not. White blood cells can only go missing from a blood sample in three ways: the marrow can be making fewer of them, or they can be used up and destroyed faster than […]
Read Post »If your dog is an unspayed female who is sick after a recent heat, a high white blood cell count may be a sign of pyometra, an infection that usually needs surgery. It develops in the weeks after a heat cycle. When it is overwhelming, it can use up neutrophils faster than the bone marrow […]
Read Post »The call from the clinic arrives with a word attached, severe or critical or emergency, and almost never with an explanation of what the machine actually counted. The part that gets left out is this: a frightening result on a complete blood count is a sorting problem before it is a diagnosis. A severe result […]
Read Post »Creatinine flagged high on a screening panel, perhaps the one run before starting long-term arthritis medication, brings the word “kidney” into the conversation, and once it is there it is easy to assume the worst. High creatinine in dogs usually means the kidneys are filtering this waste product out of the blood more slowly than […]
Read Post »Of all the numbers on a chemistry panel, BUN is one of the easiest to move, so a line reading BUN, high, does not have to mean kidney failure. A dog who was a little dehydrated, or who ate a protein-heavy meal before the blood draw, can show a high BUN with healthy kidneys. So […]
Read Post »A flagged SDMA on your dog’s bloodwork is not a kidney disease diagnosis, even though it is easy to read it that way. The report shows SDMA a little over its limit while creatinine and everything else sits inside the normal range. That combination usually means reduced kidney filtration was picked up earlier than older […]
Read Post »A kidney panel runs on one plain rule: the numbers rise as filtration falls. Creatinine is a waste product of muscle metabolism, so it climbs once the kidneys stop clearing it as briskly as they should. BUN, short for blood urea nitrogen, tracks urea, a byproduct of protein metabolism that the liver makes and the […]
Read Post »Two kidney values that are normally read as a pair have split up: creatinine is flagged high, while BUN sits comfortably in range. Now you are trying to work out which number to believe. Most explanations of kidney values assume the two rise together, but they don’t have to. An isolated high creatinine does not […]
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