Sometimes It Seems Like Stress Is My Job
So I decided to spot check Alice’s progesterone last Friday (day 37), and it was 10.7 ng/mL. Super great. I decided to do weekly checks because we ended up supplementing Zhora’s progesterone because it got lower than ideal (as it turned out, she would have held her litter, but much better to be safe than sorry).
And since I know I’ll need to do a blood draw next Wednesday for her nomograph to help determine when the optimal time to vaccinate the puppies will be, I decided to do this week’s blood draw yesterday since then we’ll just do a bigger draw next Wednesday and save having to poke her twice.
My awesome repro vet said to let them know if it drops below 8 ng/mL.
So I woke up this morning and checked the lab results. 7.1 ng/mL.
I about had a heart attack. In general, it’s recommended that you supplement if it drops below 5 ng/mL with more than five days to go. 7.1 seems awfully close to 5. And we have just under three WEEKS to go.
My repro vet was awesome and said “7.1 is perfectly high enough to maintain a pregnancy”. And while I know intellectually that they say that you really only need to be over 3, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t stressed. However, I have an awesome and knowledgeable team on my side.
Alice, meanwhile, is perfectly content. She is loving the fact that she now gets 30% more food since we entered the last three weeks yesterday. I’ve been ordering supplies for whelping and puppies. And she is getting a bit unwieldy on the stairs so we will be moving into the guest room downstairs this weekend (I usually move downstairs two weeks out, so only a few days early). She has lots of energy but sleeps a lot. And she is getting LARGE. She looks like a furry grey eggplant from some angles now!
I’ve seen published data that discusses that many bitches may naturally run low, and that there are several anecdotal cases of bitches dropping to 3 ng/mL for the last couple of weeks and holding their pregnancy just fine. I never tested Nina so for all I know she ran low-ish too. I only tested Zhora last time because we suspected she may have resorbed her first pregnancy (even though we never 100% confirmed she was pregnant that time), and while she did drop low enough to hit the supplementation threshold at day 50, when she hit 5.4 ng/mL, and we started Regumate on day 51 when a repeat test was the same, she actually never went below 3.6 ng/mL until the expected drop to initiate labor. So maybe Vallhunds in general or my lines in particular run low. Maybe they’re just in cahoots with the lab so I have to run a bunch of tests.
Either way, we’re monitoring it. I will test her again tomorrow and take some of the blood to my repro vet for them to test in house by way of comparison with our lab (IDEXX).
