Considerations for an emergency cardiac case

What is the process for managing a patient with an emergency cardiac condition? April Blong, DVM, DACVECC, an associate clinical professor at the Iowa State University Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center in Ames and the medical director at Iowa Veterinary Specialties in Des Moines, discusses considerations for veterinarians handling these cases, in a dvm360 interview.

Blong presented continuing education (CE) sessions on emergency and critical care at the 2025 Fetch dvm360 Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, where her interview was recorded. These CE sessions presented insights on abdominal and thoracic injuries in blunt force trauma cases as well as identifying and stabilizing possible traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury. In this video, she addresses rapid change with cardiac conditions including tachycardia.

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The following is a transcript of the video:

April Blong, DVM, DACVECC: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So unfortunately, with medicine, it's really hard to cookie cutter things. You have to think about this patient. What am I worried could happen with this patient and monitor accordingly? And that involves both what parameters you're monitoring. So are they on ECG? Are they on blood pressure watches? Are they on PCB watches, in addition to intervening timely, right? So if I don't want to get called at night, I can set my call parameters such that no one's ever going to call me. I might walk into a disaster in the morning, because my patient's not going to be doing well. So it's a combination of, what am I watching for, when should I at least evaluate further. Maybe I don't intervene, but at least look closer.

So tachycardia is probably one of our most common problems that we see in hospitalized patients, and it's like anything else, right? So the tachycardia, while that's what we're recognizing as a problem, is really a symptom of what's going on. And so we have to kind of think about what are the possible things that can be driving that tachycardia if we want to address it appropriately

View more videos from this interview:

• Recognizing blunt force trauma injuries
• Common causes of blunt force trauma in pets

For more coverage of the Fetch Kansas City conference, visit the dvm360 conference news page. You can also learn more and register for the 2026 Fetch dvm360 Conference in Kansas City here.