Controlling bleeding

Bleeding wounds can be really stressful. When you see that your dog has a wound and it may be bleeding quite a lot, it may just be oozing blood, there is a temptation to panic and not really know what to do. The first thing to think about is keeping your dog calm. How is this feeling for your dog? How are you going to manage the situation so that you do not get distressed with it? And how then are you going to try and stop that bleeding for them?

So the first thing to do is try and identify what kind of bleed you have got. So if you have an injury and that is seeping, just a flow of blood that is kind of dripping down the fur, it's not spurting, it's not a lot of blood everywhere, but the fur is covered with blood, this is likely to be a capillary bleed. So capillaries are the little vessels that are in your skin. That they are very external. They are quite superficial. And if you do cut one of those, they bleed quite a lot, but the pressure behind them is quite low, so they will stop quite quickly, especially if you are able to apply a little bit of pressure to them for a period of time.

If you have a bleed where it's much more profuse, there is a lot of blood, may even be pooling on the skin or even spurting out of the skin, these are much more serious bleeds. Again, you need to make sure your dog is calm because the more worked up they get, the higher their blood pressure will go and the higher or the faster this bleed will continue. With these more serious bleeds, you are still gonna try and stop the bleeding with direct pressure. But you may find that then when you release that direct pressure, they restart bleeding or they have not actually stopped. You may find the dressing that you have applied there becomes quite soaked quite quickly, and that way you know that the bleeding is not stopping. These bleeds are gonna need a little bit more intervention and they do need to go and see the vet as quickly as you can.

The more serious bleeds are the ones that will not stop with direct pressure. So when you apply your dressing, you may find that the blood is seeping through quite quickly, or that when you remove the dressing, the bleeding restarts or has not actually stopped. These more serious bleeds will need intervention from a vet. These are not going to be capillary bleeds. These are vessels that are going to be deeper in the body, like arteries or veins, where the blood pressure is a lot higher and you will need pressure for a lot longer to contain the bleeds.

With any bleed, you would initially try to apply some direct pressure to stop it. Direct pressure could be a dressing or a pad or a towel or a piece of clothing that you have that you apply to the wound for a period of time, be it five minutes, be it 10 minutes. If the pressure needs to be on the wound for longer than a couple of minutes, it may be easier for you to put a dressing and a bandage on so that you do not need to continue to apply the pressure. And in the meantime, you can be getting your dog to the vets for them to be assessed. In more serious bleeds, direct pressure will not be enough, and we will be discussing how to control those in other videos.