Soft Tissue Surgery

At VAH, all of the Doctors perform Soft Tissue Surgery. Tumor removals are a daily part of our caseload and we treat skin infections, abscesses, wounds of many sorts and caused by many things!

Elongated Soft Palate

We’ve recently added another great surgery to our skill set, and that’s the Elongated Soft Palate surgery. As dogs with short snouts become more and more popular (such as the French Bulldog and the English Bulldog), we are seeing more respiratory issues and heat intolerance.

Removing some of the extra tissue from the back of the throat helps give dogs a nice respiratory passage and they seem to have far fewer Respiratory and Digestive problems later in life. We also recommend opening up the nostrils (called ‘stenotic nares’) surgically. This helps to improve the ease of breathing by up to 30%!!!

We use electrocautery for this surgery. By using cautery, we see a lot less post-operative pain and also little to no bleeding.

There are four issues we may see in dogs with Elongated Soft Palate. Along with the Palate, these dogs (and occasional cats) have stenotic (narrowed) nostrils (that picture of the nostrils on the previous page was one of our patients :-) Stenotic Nostrils (also called “nares'“) make it difficult for pets to breathe through their nose (which is the preferred way to breathe if you are a dog or a cat.) They often also have enlarged tonsils and/or everted laryngeal saccules.

Surgery in any patient with these abnormalities does have increased risk. We do a number of things to mitigate and reduce those risks—

1) blood work prior to sedation to make certain that all of the ‘machinery’ inside is working well,

2) a physical exam prior to surgery to make certain that the heart & lungs sound good,

3) anti-nausea and anti-inflammatory medications given by injection,

4) IV fluids and

5) I will only correct TWO of the four problems above in a single surgical episode. Too much surgery increases the risk! So we will correct the two most important issues (usually the Stenotic Nares and the Elongated Soft Palate) and see how our patient does for the next few months before coming back to and working on anything else! Safety First!!!

I can’t do these surgeries by myself— I have a great team of Receptionists, Patient Care Nurses and Surgical Nurses to assist me. Yes, I am the one doing these surgeries, but it takes a Team to have a great outcome and I have an excellent Team at Valley Animal Hospital of Merced.