Okay, so now we're gonna move on to the
to the abdominal exam. Now I want to start
by running our hands down the spine feeling and palpating
with our index finger and thumb for any sources of
pain. Then we're going to go ahead and move our
hands down the flank as well as underneath. And
this is also a time in a female dog where
would be feeling mammary glands and feeling for any masses
or abnormalities there. So we've done that. We
can go ahead and run our hands down both hind
legs and we can palpate for our popliteal lymph
nodes here. That should be normal and about bean
size. Once we've done that we can go ahead
and move on to abdominal palpation. The first thing
we want to do is we want to look for
a landmark. The most easily recognizable landmarks are usually
either the bladder or a colon. So, usually we'll start with two
hands on a dog this size and just press in
gently but firmly from the side. Feeling this caudal
abdominal area for a urinary bladder which for him is
about the size of a tennis ball or feeling for
a colon which is a little bit more dorsally.
Once we've identified those as a landmark we can
go ahead and move on a little bit more cranially
Now we should be able to feel the
spleen here down ventrally and then most furthest cranially,
We should be able to just feel the edge
of the liver here. Up under here then move
dorsally and feel up under the ribs and close
to the spine. And we're feeling for kidneys and
we should just be able to feel a caudal pull.
And then go ahead and move backwards, feeling through
our pool of intestines here for anything abnormal. And ending
up caudally back at the bladder again. Now
we can palpate this way with both hands. We
could also, on a smaller dog come with one
hand palpate like this. Or on an even larger dog
we could come from behind beneath the legs and palpate
like that. Once we've done that, we're finished
with our abdominal palpation and we can move on
to the urogenital and rectal exam.