Frisco Emergency Pet Care Answers Your Most Common Pet Questions – Part 2

A new lump shows up on your dog and suddenly you are doing mental math at 2 a.m. Is it a harmless fatty bump, a skin growth that can wait, or something that needs help now? We walk through how we think about lumps and bumps in real life, including what benign masses often look like, why lipomas can quietly grow into a much bigger problem, and how a fine needle aspirate and cytology can turn a scary unknown into a clear next step.

We also tackle one of the most common worries we hear from pet parents: “Is my dog too old for anesthesia?” We talk honestly about senior dog anesthesia risk, what modern veterinary monitoring looks like, and why untreated dental disease can be more dangerous than a carefully managed anesthetic. If your pet needs dental work and a mass removal, we also explain why it can make sense to plan smart and limit the number of times your pet goes under anesthesia.

Then we shift to kitchen-counter chaos: chocolate toxicity by type and cocoa percentage, why unrisen bread dough with yeast is always an emergency, and why human medications are a major red-flag ingestion. We also cover what it usually means when an object passes all the way through, and why “they did it before” is not a safety plan.

If this helped you think more clearly about pet emergencies, subscribe, share the episode with a fellow pet parent, and leave a review so more people can find reliable emergency vet guidance. What is the one scenario you want us to break down next?

To learn more about Frisco Emergency Pet Care visit:
https://www.FriscoEmergencyPetCare.com
Frisco Emergency Pet Care 
11201 Preston Road 
Frisco, Texas 75033 
469-287-6767 

Transcript

Welcome And What We Cover

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Frisco Emergency Pet Care Podcast, your trusted source for expert insight into emergency veterinary medicine. Hosted by Dr. Mike Lasasso, Chief of Staff at Frisco Emergency Pet Care, this podcast brings you essential information to help protect the health and safety of your dogs and cats. Serving North Dallas with 24-7 emergency and critical care, the team at Frisco Emergency Pet Care is here when every second counts. Now, let's begin.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Today we're digging into the ones that can truly make a difference in your pet's health and safety. Welcome. I'm Julie Schwenzer, co-host and producer here with Dr. Mike Lasasso. He's the chief of staff at Frisco Emergency Pet Care and Dog Dad to Bubbles. So, Dr. Lasasso, we're really excited to talk to you. This is part two of Parents Frequently Asked Questions. And last time you kindly covered topics on vaccines and diet, as well as, you know, when the dog swallows something that they shouldn't be, which can happen quite a bit, as you said, you've seen an emergency in dental care. So thanks again for covering all that. Today, can we start talking about some other questions that we've looked at across the internet and in different social media platforms?

Lumps And When They Matter

SPEAKER_00 1:34

And one big one is lumps. When do you think a lump could be dangerous and needs to be checked versus cases where you see that it's just benign and maybe just like a fatty, you know?

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Well, it's a good question. I think the right answer is probably everyone should be checked out. But those of us that have got years of experience and you're dealing with a 12-year-old poodle, you know that those little raised kind of fleshy-colored masses that we get on poodles and schnauzers and these older other dogs, those are benign gross. We call it sebaceous adenomas. Removal's not a big deal. They actually, I think, interfere with the groomer more than they do anything else. They tend to tend to bleed and will ooze, especially if the if the clippers run right over the top of them. So, you know, not really a problem. We also see quite a few fatty masses. Lipomas occur in people, they occur in dogs. I think I've seen them in cats, not very frequently, but they do happen. Um those benign fatty masses sometimes will catch up to us. A lot of us will not remove them unless it is impeding function somehow. And then we get kind of caught in this catch-22 of, well, I don't want to remove it because it's it's too small, it's not worth the time. And then when they come back in, sometimes it's been a couple of years. You're like, oh well, now it's big enough that it's too big a project. And you know, I've seen some I've seen some basketball-sized lipomas on some not very large dogs that um, you know, on beagles and things. You're like, how did that get there? It's a difficult, difficult path. Almost everything else, though, I would recommend having it checked out, at least doing some kind of a cytology study or a we call a fine needle aspirate, putting a putting a very small needle into that and checking the cells and our ability to do some of that cytology and to use not only AI, but to have a cytologist or a clinical pathologist look at those cells and give an opinion. Sometimes I think is really helpful to determine if it needs to come off because the lumps and bumps definitely are concerning. I mean, I personally probably have more lipomas than any dog you'll know. Um so it happens in people too, and it took me forever to actually have one of mine looked at. It was probably there for 20 years before anybody decided it was worth looking at. We obviously don't have that kind of time to wait in our pets. But yeah, I would say that everything really should be looked at, if nothing else but for your peace of mind.

Are Senior Dogs Too Old For Surgery

SPEAKER_00 4:02

And you know, when you talked about the lumps too being removed, it makes me think about a lot of the senior dogs that I know of that encounter it more often as they get older. And then that poses a question is my dog too old to operate on? Is that too risky? Is that a concern that you have a lot when you see emergency cases? Or they're already too sick, and you know, should we operate? Should we put this dog through that anesthesia and that healing process?

SPEAKER_02 4:29

I think my opinion differs quite a bit from a lot of the conventional wisdoms that I was taught and that I still hear on a day-to-day basis. So I have a lot of people who say, you know, my dog's 12, my doctor says that she's too old, you know, to have her teeth clean. And I would point out that most modern hospitals, certainly including ours, but we're not the only one. We use usually a combination of procofol or alfaxolone and sevofluorine or isoflorane, some form of an inhalant ether to keep them asleep and unconscious, anesthetized would be the appropriate term. Those are the same drugs they used on the Queen Mother when she was 98 years old and they replaced both of her hips. So if those drugs are good enough for the most beloved person ever to live in the United Kingdom to have surgery at close to 100 years of age, I don't think it's really that dangerous, honestly. And I would suggest that dental disease is actually more dangerous than anesthesia. Now, yes, you are at an increased risk. Age is not a disease, but age does carry with it some responsibilities, some changes in your body. As I am almost 60, I understand that better today than I did 20 years ago. And they're not as good an anesthetic candidate. And I would even say that maybe the chance of having an untoward incident, uh, a reaction to anesthesia is maybe five to ten times higher, which sounds terrifying until you look at what the original percentage was and you actually do the math. So I would say the incidence of problems under anesthesia in young healthy dogs happens less than one in a thousand times or 0.1% of the time. So if we multiply that by five or ten times, you're looking at a half to one percent of the time, there's going to be enough. And I mean, we would like to get that close to zero, but in most modern hospitals, you're talking about constant ECG monitoring, maybe NTIL CO2. We've gotten better monitoring as the technology for everything else has gotten better, it's also gotten smaller and cheaper. So most hospitals are actually doing what we should all have been doing since the late 90s, which was having everything on all kinds of, you know, we call them beep beeps. Uh Monty Python would refer to that as the machine that goes ping. But all the all that monitoring equipment really should be fairly routine in small animal practice. So anesthesia safe. I would still have that mask removed. We do want to take advantage of every anesthetic episode, though. So if we've got a mask to remove and we know we're doing a teeth cleaning, maybe it makes sense to have all that work up and to do everything at once as much as is possible so that you don't put them under any more often than you really need to. I mean, I think that's common sense. It's also the cheaper way to do things most of the time.

Chocolate Bread Dough And Medication Risks

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Okay, another question for you. And you covered this regarding toxins and things that dogs and cats should not eat. And they do. Sure. How much warrants a trip to the emergency event and what does not when it comes to chocolate, different types of chocolate, which you've mentioned, and then also, you know, common things that they might grab off the counter, cookies or um raw meat or something like that?

SPEAKER_02 8:06

Sure. So the um raw meat, probably not usually a big deal. I mean, from a from an infectious disease standpoint, I think that's really pretty negligible from a foreign body standpoint. Pretty negligible. Unrisen bread dough that contains yeast is incredibly dangerous. Uh, and and warrants a trip to the emergency room every time. Cookies almost never. Um, they would have to have a ton of macadamia nuts or a ton of uh really dark chocolate. Typically, people don't use the really good, expensive chocolate, which also happens to be the most toxic in things like cookies, so it really isn't nearly nearly as dangerous as you might think. Um chocolate itself, just straight chocolate, it depends on size of the dog, amount of chocolate, and the type of chocolate. White chocolate's got no caffeine in it, it's not at all toxic. Milk chocolate has got a little bit more, semi-sweet's got more. Then we have the more expensive forms: the 64, the 72, the 84, those percentages of cocoa. As those percentages go up, so does the caffeine, and that's really the dangerous part. When it comes to human medication, I would be very concerned about all of it. You just don't know what the dose is. Depends on the size of the dog, depends on a lot of things. We almost invariably prefer to have that out rather than in.

If It Comes Out Are They Safe

SPEAKER_00 9:48

And on that note, what a way to wrap this up with a pleasant image. But if the dog gets it all out, whether the dog or cat throws it up or gets it out the other way, like I've seen cases where dogs like eat a whole like loads of mini bags of jelly beans, but the whole bag came out because you know they were able to grab it from the kids' Easter basket. If it gets out, are we safe, or is there a chance something got into the body or the other parts of you know their system?

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Typically, if they'll pass it all the way through. I mean, I've had clients say, Well, I can't believe that that sock got stuck because you know we find a sock in the backyard once a month. Well, and I'm thinking, well, you've been dodging lots and lots of bullets. This one you didn't do such a good job at. Um, because it it it certainly can be a problem. But if it makes it all the way out, then typically it's it's not an issue.

Training Limits Some Emergencies

SPEAKER_00 10:39

And you obviously you're uh advocate for uh training and and avoiding some behavioral issues, I know. So you see quite a difference. Like you don't see dogs that have been trained not to, you know, pull in the leash, not to take things off the counter or the table. Like they at least can avoid those other types of emergencies.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

Uh you know, I don't I don't know that I've seen a lot of difference in like foreign body suggestions and countersurfing in dogs that have had a lot of obedience work versus dogs that have not. I know that the bond they have with their owner is much stronger because obedience training, to be fair, is as much for the human being as it is for the dog. But it it lets you kind of make sure that you're on the same page and you understand how they think and they get to see how you think and understand what your mannerisms really mean. Certainly makes walking them significantly easier, which means it probably happens more often, which is a good thing. Even the well-behaved ones, I suspect, if they had the opportunity to counter-surf, would still do that, right? I mean, it's not really a big problem in the in the dachshund, but it is a problem in the taller dogs and the doodles and other things.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Okay, well, thank you, Dr. Lasasso. I wish we had more time. It's always valuable insight.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Yes, ma'am. Appreciate the time.

How To Reach Frisco Emergency

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Thank you for listening to the Frisco Emergency Pet Care Podcast. To learn more, visit Frisco PetEr.com. Call 469-287-6767. Or stop by 11201 Preston Road, Frisco, Texas, 75033. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Frisco Emergency Pet Care is always here when your pet needs us most. Until next time, take care of your pets, and they'll take care of you.