Identifying signs and managing triage for a patient in shock

What signs of shock should a veterinary team identify in emergency cases? And what triage should be done to care for a patient in shock?

April Blong, DVM, DACVECC, discussed shock and how to manage as part of a series of continuing education lectures she presented at the 2025 Fetch Kansas City, Missouri. In an interview with dvm360, she discussed common signs of shock that patients exhibit when seen in veterinary emergency facilities and how medical care providers can improve outcomes with early interventions.

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Blong is 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. A graduate of Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, she completed a residency in emergency and critical care at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The following is a transcript of this video:

April Blong, DVM, DACVECC: Most commonly, we see things like elevated heart rate, weak pulses, pale gums. And I think a lot of people recognize the patient that comes in collapse, the gums are white. You can't feel the pulses. That patient’s in trouble. I think where the learning curve sort of happens is that that's the end stage of shock. We want to catch these patients when they're just mildly tachycardic. Their respiratory is just a little elevated. Their pulses are okay, but they're not great. They're CRTs [are] right at that 2-second mark. Those are those kiddos and those compensated shock where we really want to intervene, because those are the ones we know we can always fix. If we intervene during the compensated stage of shock, they haven't accumulated organ injury. They haven't accumulated all the damage from shock, and that patient, at least from a shock standpoint, is always reversible. And so I think it's really educating people on to catch those signs before they get to where they're all the way down the road: pale gums, passed out, unresponsive. That's the key.

For more coverage of the Fetch Kansas City conference, visit the dvm360 conference news page.