Oh Yeah, You Blend

Alice’s progesterone was 0.6 ng/mL on Wednesday, and 1.8 today (Day 9). This was on the repro vet’s in house machine, we also sent some serum to IDEXX so we will see how they compare when we get that back. The in house machine is pretty accurate but it uses a different technology than the IDEXX reference lab uses (meow meow science meow).

We are also freezing some serum from each blood draw so that once we know she has ovulated we can go back and test it from the relevant day for lutenizing hormone, that gives us a much more exact date to go by. Because frozen semen is quite delicate (“compromised” as they say), once it thaws you only have a few hours for it to get where it needs to go and do its thing, so the closer to perfect you can make your timing, the better. With live cover or side by side AI, you’re actually better to be a little early with your breeding, since fresh semen can live for 5-7 days inside the female, so it can just hang out and wait for the eggs to be dropped and then ripen (ripening takes roughly 2 days). The more compromised the semen is, the shorter its lifespan, so chilled lives far less time than fresh does, and frozen lives the shortest time of all (just 12-24 hours).

Awesome repro tech Renee said “if I were a betting woman, I’d put money on next weekend being go time, so clear your calendar”. So we will see!

Yesterday Alice’s progesterone was 0.4 ng/mL. We want to see a 3-4 point jump in a 24 hour period (usually you want to see them hit approximately 5 and then jump) to show ovulation. So not yet! Retest tomorrow.

Usually I test every other day starting on day 3-5 until we need to start testing daily. The only panic will be if we need to breed at a time the repro vet isn’t available but let’s not worry until and unless we need to!

This little drop of blood means Alice is in season! First progesterone test on Monday!