[Ellie May]

I wanted to breed Ellie. Didn't end up doing it (in part thanks to YT).
Nobody ever explained the benefits of spaying to me. So at age 6 she was still unaltered. When I did learn about the benefits, I still didn't want to do it and I did have good reasons (fear of anesthesia and not wanting to remove her "parts"). It came down to the fact that her vet was very concerned to just leave her unaltered. With every heat cycle, the risk of pyometra (uterine infection) increases. Usually an emergency spay is needed if this happens (and hopefully it's diagnosed in time). But this spay would have had to be done while she was very sick. There would have also been a risk of spilling the pus out of the uterus and into her body causing massive problems (can be hard to maneuver in small dogs' abdomens and the uterus can rupture in this state). I decided to go ahead with it, but before we got to it, I found some lumps in Ellie's mammary chain. Very scary... They were small and the hope was that they were just do to hormonal issues and weren't cancerous. The plan was to spay and hope things straightened out. Thank God they did go away after spay and there haven't been any problems like that since. A dog who is spayed before her first heat has less than a 1% chance of developing mammary cancer. Spayed after the first heat but before the second it goes up to 8%. Anytime after the second heat it is about 26%. But even for the older females, hopefully the reduced hormonal issues after spay would benefit the their mammary glands.