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How Our Veterinary Urgent Care Team Diagnoses Sick and Injured Pets
Learn how in-house bloodwork, ultrasound, microscopy, and oxygen support help our veterinary urgent care team diagnose sick and injured pets.
Learn how in-house bloodwork, ultrasound, microscopy, and oxygen support help our veterinary urgent care team diagnose sick and injured pets.
When your cat or dog suddenly becomes sick or injured, determining what is wrong is the first step toward helping them feel better. A physical examination provides important information, but many urgent medical concerns require additional testing to understand what is happening inside your pet’s body.
At Mainely Veterinary Dentistry & Urgent Care, our team uses in-house laboratory testing, ultrasound, microscopy, short-term oxygen support, and other diagnostic capabilities to evaluate pets experiencing unexpected illnesses and injuries.
These tools help us provide prompt veterinary urgent care for cats and dogs throughout Southern Maine.
Veterinary urgent care is intended for medical concerns that require prompt attention but are not immediately life-threatening. Depending on your pet’s condition, urgent care may be appropriate for concerns such as:
The tests recommended during an urgent care visit will depend on your pet’s symptoms, medical history, physical examination, and overall condition. Not every pet needs every available test.
Our goal is to gather the information necessary to make an informed diagnosis, begin appropriate treatment, or determine whether your pet needs a higher level of care.
Diagnostic equipment supports the veterinarian’s examination, but it does not replace it. Before recommending tests, the veterinary team may evaluate your pet’s temperature, hydration, heart rate, breathing, gums, abdomen, mobility, and other areas related to the symptoms you have noticed.
The veterinarian may also ask questions such as:
Your answers, combined with the physical examination, help the veterinarian determine which diagnostic tests may be most useful.
Bloodwork can provide valuable information when a pet is vomiting, experiencing diarrhea, refusing food, acting lethargic, bleeding unexpectedly, or showing other signs of illness.
Our in-house laboratory equipment allows our veterinary team to evaluate several important areas of a pet’s health.
A complete blood count, commonly called a CBC, evaluates your pet’s red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets.
The results may help the veterinarian identify or investigate:
White blood cell changes may provide clues about inflammation or infection. Red blood cells help carry oxygen throughout the body, while platelets play an important role in blood clotting.
Abnormal results do not always identify one specific condition on their own. The veterinarian interprets the results alongside your pet’s symptoms, examination, and any other diagnostic findings.
Blood chemistry testing helps assess organ function and other processes occurring inside the body. Depending on the panel performed, it may provide information about:
This can be especially useful when evaluating vomiting, diarrhea, appetite loss, weakness, increased thirst, increased urination, or possible toxin exposure.
Our in-house diagnostic capabilities also include coagulation testing, which evaluates how effectively a pet’s blood is clotting.
As Dr. Jennifer Keaten explains:
“We also have the ability to look at a coagulation panel to see if we are having problems with clotting issues, which is definitely important for our urgent care practice.”
Clotting tests may be recommended when a pet has unusual bleeding, significant bruising, certain toxin exposures, or another condition that may affect the body’s ability to form blood clots.
Urinary symptoms can be painful and may become serious, particularly when a pet is unable to pass urine normally.
An in-house urinalysis can help the veterinary team evaluate characteristics of your pet’s urine and look for findings that may be associated with:
Signs that your pet may be experiencing a urinary problem include frequent attempts to urinate, straining, urinating small amounts, accidents in the house, blood in the urine, licking the urinary area, or crying while attempting to urinate.
A cat that is repeatedly straining without producing urine may have a life-threatening urinary blockage and should receive emergency veterinary care immediately.
An ultrasound uses sound waves to produce real-time images of structures inside the body. It does not use radiation and can often be performed while a pet is awake, although some anxious or uncomfortable patients may benefit from sedation.
During an abdominal ultrasound, the veterinary team may examine organs and structures such as the:
Ultrasound may be useful when evaluating vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal discomfort, urinary symptoms, kidney concerns, abnormal bloodwork, or a suspected gastrointestinal problem.
“Sometimes other diagnostics might indicate that we need to look more closely in the abdomen, and ultrasound is a wonderful way to do that,” explains Dr. Keaten.
Ultrasound and X-rays provide different types of information. Ultrasound is especially useful for examining many soft-tissue structures and observing movement within the body. X-rays may be more useful for evaluating bones, certain foreign objects, gas patterns, bladder stones, and other conditions.
Depending on the suspected problem, the veterinarian may recommend one type of imaging or a combination of diagnostic tests.
A microscope can provide valuable information about infections, inflammation, masses, and other abnormalities. Our microscope includes a camera that allows images from a slide to be captured and added to a patient’s medical record.
During an urgent care visit, microscopy may be used to examine samples from:
For example, ear cytology allows the veterinary team to examine material from the ear canal for evidence of yeast, bacteria, inflammatory cells, or other abnormalities. This information can help guide appropriate treatment instead of treating every ear problem the same way.
A veterinarian may also collect a small sample of cells from a lump using a needle, a procedure known as a fine-needle aspiration.
“If we want to know whether we’re concerned that a mass is a tumor, an abscess, or an infection, the microscope allows us to look at those things on a slide,” says Dr. Keaten.
Microscopic examination can provide helpful preliminary information, but it does not always produce a final diagnosis. Some samples may need to be submitted to a veterinary pathologist for a more complete evaluation.
Breathing problems must always be taken seriously. Our oxygen kennel allows us to provide supplemental oxygen in certain situations, including mild respiratory concerns or short-term stabilization before transferring a patient to an emergency facility.
The enclosed kennel provides an oxygen-rich environment without requiring the pet to wear a mask. This may be less stressful for some cats and dogs that are already having difficulty breathing.
However, an urgent care practice is not a substitute for an emergency and critical care hospital when a pet is experiencing severe respiratory distress.
As Dr. Keaten emphasizes:
“If your pet is in extreme respiratory distress, you should go to the emergency clinic.”
Signs that require immediate emergency care may include:
When you are unsure whether your pet’s breathing problem is appropriate for urgent care, contact a veterinary professional for guidance while preparing to seek care.
Although this equipment supports many general urgent care cases, some unexpected problems involve a pet’s mouth, teeth, jaw, or face.
Examples include:
Because Mainely Veterinary Dentistry & Urgent Care focuses on both advanced veterinary dentistry and weekend urgent care, our team can evaluate urgent concerns that may have a dental or oral cause.
For certain dental, nasal, sinus, ear, jaw, or facial conditions, our VetCAT Cone Beam CT provides detailed three-dimensional images of the skull.
Cone Beam CT is not needed for a typical urgent care visit. However, it may be helpful when a pet’s condition involves a complicated tooth-root problem, facial trauma, suspected jaw injury, oral mass, or another condition that cannot be fully evaluated through a visual examination alone.
Pet owners can learn more about how this technology works in our article about Cone Beam CT for veterinary dentistry.
Understanding the difference between urgent and emergency veterinary care can help you choose the appropriate facility.
Urgent care may be appropriate when your pet needs prompt attention but is otherwise stable. An emergency hospital is generally the safer choice when your pet may need immediate life-saving treatment, intensive monitoring, hospitalization, emergency surgery, or around-the-clock care.
Seek emergency veterinary care immediately for symptoms such as:
If our team determines that your pet requires a higher level of care, we can discuss the need for transfer to an emergency facility.
Unexpected illnesses and injuries do not always happen during regular weekday veterinary hours. Mainely Veterinary Dentistry & Urgent Care provides weekend urgent care for cats and dogs throughout Southern Maine.
Our urgent care hours are:
When your pet is experiencing a non-life-threatening medical or dental concern that should not wait until Monday, visit our urgent care services page to learn more about the conditions we treat.
You can also book an urgent care appointment online or call us at (207) 481-8232 for assistance.
