Summer in Southern California can put your pet at great risk of heat related injury. With temperatures routinely hitting the 90s and often breaking 100, it is important to understand heat stress and heat stroke and what you can do to help protect your pets.
In order to understand why pets get heat stress/stroke, we should take a moment to discuss how they cool themselves. Dogs do not really sweat to cool themselves. Instead, they rely primarily on panting and to a much lesser degree to vasodilation (opening of the blood vessels near the skin) to help lose heat via radiation away from the body. When dogs pant, a large amount of heat is removed from the body through the removal of warmed water vapor from the lungs, and evaporation from the tongue. This process has its limits and cannot continue to work effectively when the temperatures start to soar.

After 5 years of outstanding service, Nicole is moving on from ARPH. Nicole has worked for us during a formative period of her life and it has been a pleasure watching her grow and mature into the wonderful person she is today. She has been the voice and face of our practice to many of you for years; answering your questions, solving your problems and we will all miss her dearly.
Nicole has started on a new career path in mortgage banking and we wish her all the best of luck. If any of you would like to contact her, simply send a card or email to the practice and we will forward it to her.
Nicole's shoes will be hard, if not impossible to fill, but we've hired a number of great new people to help fill in the gap in our reception staff. Please have patience with them as they come up to speed at the front desk.

Luke is a 7 year old Sheperd mix who presented to us last month with a history of vomiting and reduced appetite for a period of 4 days. During the history taking, the owners thought that Luke might have eaten a rag a few days before the symptoms began. Nothing else had changed in the house and Luke was not exposed to any new foods or toxins.
On presentation, Luke was subdued (he's usually very rambunctious) and appeared a bit dehydrated. His abdomen was tense but I was unable to feel any discrete mass. Based on the history, we did a diagnostic work-up consisting of radiographs (x-rays) of the belly, and blood work. On the radiographs, the intestines appeared bunched together, but we were unable to definitively see any foreign body. (The reason for this is that cloth, strings and non metallic or stone foreign bodies don’t often show up on normal radiographs). The blood work was normal for a dog of his age with evidence of mild dehydration.