I love this photo of iPup Tristan and Sparkler Kiri — thank you, Alison!
I have yet another breeding update/insight: Labs can differ.
When progesterone is drawn by my vet, I drive the blood over to the human hospital lab for testing.
I had two progesterones done 500+ miles away from home and those were run by a veterinary lab. Both times the results were lower than expected/desired and created significant concerns. In fact, I drove home on Christmas because of the unfortunate 2.3 value (collected on 12/24) — only to turn around and drive back 500+ miles the next morning because the value was 17.
Could the value really have been 2.3 — down from 2.8 the same time of day 24-hours before? Of course.
After all, the 2.8 was slightly down from 3.2, although the blood was drawn at different times of day and the values were close enough to call it a bit of a “stall” — a drop of almost an entire point looked less like a stall and more like an anovulatory cycle, and so I drove home.
BUT the progesterone of 17 from the human hospital lab 46 hours later sent me racing back — good thing I had not unpacked and the weather was cooperative.
We tested again 23-hours later using the outside veterinary lab — once again results showed a drop in progesterone when it (progesterone) should have been rising.
12/26 at home: 17
12/27 (23 hours later and outside lab): 13.7
Crapola.
The three natural breedings had gone well — no issues there. But a dropping progesterone was a bad sign. I drove home worried, as you might imagine.
BUT 21 hours after we got that 13.7 from the outside lab, our home lab reported a progesterone of 33!!!
If you remove the outside lab values, the progesterone looks like this:
Day 7: .46
Day 8: .59
Day 9: Not Done
Day 10: 3.23
Day 11: 2.8
Day 12: Outside Lab (BRED)
Day 13: Not Done (Christmas)
Day 14: 17 (BRED)
Day 15: Outside Lab (BRED)
Day 16: 33
Adding in the Outside Lab values changed the picture, adding in worry (and over 1,000 miles of driving). When we look at the values from the same (human hospital) lab, the picture is much more cheerful and promising.
There is no way to know if there are validity issues (accuracy) at the outside lab or if there are reliability issues between the two labs.
Perhaps travel impacted values, although that doesn’t make sense since there was travel all over the place (literally!) since we started testing.
Perhaps Sparkle’s progesterone really did those gyrations. No way to know.
It is, however, concerning and puzzling — and reminds me of the importance of both validity and reliability of results when so much is on the line. In the future, I will ask for blood to be sent to two different labs when testing progesterone away from home at critical times in a breeding cycle.
What we do know is that we had great timing for three natural breedings — the rest is up to the Lucky Socks.
