Best of luck, I am sure it will all be fine

Good luck for today, I'll be thinking of you both. Hope it goes smoothly.

Ok, Operation Extract Blood was a success. It took aaaaaages. He was given the maximum dose of sedative and while he was injected without issue, he took ages to go down. He was all sleepy then the vet nurse walked in and he jumped up and barked we couldn't give him any more and thought we might have to abort. Thankfully we gave him and extra 15 mins and eventually he went down.

Then we had a nightmare actually getting the blood out. The vet didn't want to shave him as he has very sensitive skin and she was convinced he'd get an infected rash. So front leg one, took a veeeeery long time to get out 10mls. Tried front leg two, no joy. Tried back leg, no joy. We needed non clotted blood so ended up having to try the jugular (wanted to avoid in case it woke him up), took a while too but finally got that last bit out of the jugular. He came around ok. We ended up laughing as a normal dog would have had blood out in 10 mins flat, it took over an hour to do Cain including the sedation!

Got enough blood to send for Thyroid 5 test by Hemopet in the US, that should be going priority mail on Tuesday. Also got enough blood to run a "gold standard" full thyroid panel in the UK too, out of curiosity. Also running a full blood work up and some sort of smear to count red and white blood cells, just for good measure. Basically we decided that if we were going through this much hassle to get blood, might as well run tests on the lot!

My poor vet said she doesn't know what to do if the two thyroid tests disagree overall though, not too stressful for Cain. He's absolutely spark out on the floor now, sleeping it off!

Vet said she had read that dogs on raw tend to have higher thyroid readings, anyone heard that before?

Yes Jean Dodds says in her book that the normal values for some of teh standard diagnostic lab tests do not apply to animals on a raw diet.

Some studies have shown that raw fed dogs have high red blood cell counts, BUN etc and are lower in other values.

One disadvantage of taking blood under sedation is that the blood pressure drops.

The heavier the sedation the more pronounced that effect is, so it is less easy to extract blood from a heavily sedated dog than a lightly, or unsedated one, although of course that may be compared to being impossible without!

Hmmmm interesting. Her form does ask for diet info, so I presume that will be taken into account when testing.

Yes, that was basically the problem the vet said that if he was awake, sitting up and she could access the jugular them she'd could have done it in no time. But in true Cain style, he likes to make life hard The vet enjoyed giving Cain a sleeping pat though, she can't touch him when he's awake.

Aww well glad it was a success albeit a little stressful!

Good luck with sending the results off etc. hope it all goes well, keep us posted

Ok, got some of the UK results back today. Still missing number of the thyroid tests but I think it was the T4 that we got back. Apparently a normal range is 25-50 and Cain's was 39, so he's not even borderline low. Although we are still waiting on T3 and another thyroid result. She also mentioned another result (can't remember which) which should be 0.6 or lower and Cain was 0.04 which apparently is very good.

Most of his full blood panel came back today too. A few were on the high end of the scale, but these co-incided with those results expected for raw fed dogs. Another kidney indicator was a little low, but again she said she suspected it was diet related and nothing to worry about. 99% of the results were normal so it looks like Cain is in pretty good health. The blood should be dispatched to America today too.

Vet said she'll be very interested to see the US results in comparison with the UK results, particularly as Cain is currently showing no indication of being hypothyroid.

Thats good news! I am keen to see if the US results come back any different as I plumped for having the full panel done here (although IDEXX said they do not do T3 as its of no value?) . I had his results back yesterday

T4 was 14.6 now 8.4 (range 13 - 51)
FT4 7.3 (range 6 - 40)
TGaa Clear (am told 90% of dogs who are Hypo have TGaa)
TSH 0.05 still normal (<0.5)

IDEXX say he is not Hypo but his T4 is now considered LOW

My vet said if i wanted we could trial soloxine but as it can accerlate underlying heart conditions then she would prefer not to (a) Dobes are prone to DCM and b) T4 being a possible indicator for other non thyroidal illness including heart conditions) and retest in 2 -3 months and see where we are then (as its possible we have just picked it up early).

Applying Jean Dodds view on where he should be within ranges (upper 50%) she would advise medication.

I have decided to wait and retest. We have also discussed referral for an echo / holter monitoring as a possibility when we have the next set of results back. I feel the overwhelming urge to start smoking again!!

Oops forgot to ask which lab did your vet use? Interesting that they said normal is 25-50 (which is inline with Jean Dodds view) IDEXX say T4 Normal range is 13 - 51 which i have been challenging with my vet