I had a puppy buyer call me crying, their girl was spayed on Tuesday last week, and she apparently had some sort of horrible reaction to the suture material. After 3 surgeries to remove and replace, they finally stapled her and she is doing fine.

Has anyone else heard of this before? She's 14 months old. Each of the rest of the litter of 7 has been spayed or neutered except mine, and no other problems.

Its curious to me.

Have not experienced it but have heard of dogs having reactions to the suturs.

Poor pup having to go thru all of that. Glad the staples did the trick.

Yes, I have heard of this before, specifically to the glue that is used instead of the stitches. It was in a cat I had, but the reaction was the same. Finally did the same thing with the staples.

We see people have reactions to suture not infrequently. Typically their incision gets red and their body tries to "spit" out the suture material. Have never seen a total body reaction (rash, etc) however. It is unpredictable who it will happen to. Suture that is braided (like silk suture) is more likely to produce a reaction than suture that is not braided (chromic gut, nylon, etc). Staples are external, so not an issue, but sometimes staples are more irritating.

So now I will ask, would you breed this girl's mother again? She's in season now, and I was thinking of another litter, this would be her second, to a different sire.

Is this an allergy issue one would shy away from.

forgive me for sounding novice, this is the first time I've ever had any sort of problem with my puppies. Its making me think twice.

I had a bitch that went in for an emergency C-section. 4 days later she developed a hole that was draining. Took her back to the vets and she took her back into surgery, opened her up and she was having a reaction to the dissolving sutures. It was so bad that she had to be spayed.
I kept a bitch and there have never been any problems w/ her offspring. She has retired and I am running on the next generation.

I also had a bitch that was allergic to absorbable sutures. She had a very bad reaction around her incision when she was spayed and so my vet never used them on her again. Later, she had to have ACL surgery and I told the orthopedic vet that she was allergic, but he knew better than I did (!) and used absorbable anyway. Although the incision healed okay, for months after she had what looked like black heads all along the suture line out of which a brown substance would ooze. My vet told me to hot pack the area until it finally stopped.

After c-section, my girl also had problems along the incision line. Her problem was lumps. A line of marble sized lumps down her incision line. Vet said reaction, another round of antibiotics and she was fine.