Again, what the dog presents for will dictate what we have to do. And not to be repetitive, but on wellness visits, yearly checkups, heartworm tests, stool samples, and maybe even some wellness blood work, which is a CBC chem. Those are the most common. If you bring an animal in that presents for PU/PD, drinking a lot of water, urinating a lot...maybe they’re losing weight or dehydrated, then, no. My focus goes more to diabetes, hyperthyroidism, kidney failure, those kinds of things. So I'm much more inclined to get CBC chemistry and urinalysis on those animals. So again, it just depends on what they're presenting for, how sick they are, what their clinical signs are. All of that is going to dictate what tests we potentially run.

The most common things that I do on a day-to-day basis would be things such as heartworm tests, fecal samples or stool samples, maybe urinalysis, and probably almost as common we do things like chemistry panels and CBCs. Those are probably the big five or so types of lab tests run in veterinary clinics day-to-day, numerous times a day. We might have to send off other lab tests, like maybe a test for Cushing's disease, like a low dose dex suppression test or an ACTH stim test or thyroid testing. You could pick a disease presentation, and there's probably a specialty test that I can run to give you more information about it. But the ones I listed previously were probably the most common that we use.

Quite a lot. Laboratory tests in dogs allow us to get information from things or organs, perhaps internally, that we can't otherwise determine from an outward exam. And that's the best way to look at it. Because I can put my hands on a dog, I can look at things, and I can check their color and listen to their heart and do all those kinds of things. But I can't tell you what their liver function is. I can't tell you what their kidney function is. I can't tell you what their blood sugar is. So that's where laboratory tests come in and give us answers that we may not otherwise be able to see from the outside.

All of these are so variable, but it's okay. So orthopedic injuries, obviously I'm looking at fractures, dislocations, any change in the structure of the bone, if there's a tumor there, those kinds of things is what I'm looking for, for that. Where it gets a little hairier, you start getting into ultrasound, maybe MRI. A lot of times you're looking at soft tissue structures for that. So maybe you're looking for a tumor that's growing off as a soft tissue organ. Maybe you're looking for something with the integrity or lack thereof inside of an organ, like in the lungs or the spleen or the liver or things like that. So again, if people saw the last segment I talked about, you have to know what normal looks like before you can recognize abnormal. That's where it's difficult to answer this question with being very specific, because it just depends on what condition or disease process we're looking further into. I'm sorry, that's a real fake answer.