Ash'lee and Mr. Scott Shore
On July 12th Mr. Shore brought in his dog Ash'lee, a cute, six year old spayed female Shih Tzu. Ash'lee had always been very good and never had accidents in the house, but all of a sudden she was squatting a lot and urinating in the house. Her small puddles of urine also smelled very strong. Ash'lee's physical examination was unremarkable. Everything checked out fine, but her bladder was difficult to palpate because it was very small and nearly empty. We were unable to collect a urine sample from her for urinalysis, but blood was sent off to the laboratory to check her kidney function and pending the results we started her on antibiotics for a presumed lower Urinary Tract Infection. The next day the blood results came back. Fortunately they were perfectly normal.
Unfortunately, a week later Mr. Shore called to tell us that Ash'lee still had exactly the same symptoms as before. I recommended he bring her back to the clinic so we could check her again. Hopefully we would be able to collect a urine sample this time and sent it in to the lab for culture and sensitivity testing. (We see more and more resistant bacteria nowadays, especially in urinary tract infections, and this way the lab tests which antibiotic will kill the specific bacteria that is cultured from the urine. I also wanted to take radio-graphs of her bladder to make sure she did not have bladder stones. On July 23rd Ash'lee was back, we proceeded as planned and lo and behold, the X rays showed multiple bladder stones! We scheduled her for surgery that afternoon and I removed six stones from her bladder. She came through the surgery wonderfully and went home the next morning to a very happy owner. Chemical analysis showed Ash'lee's bladder stones to be composed of mainly struvite. She will have to be fed a special acidifying diet to prevent the recurrence of the stones, but she was already symptom free a few days after surgery.
Bladder
Stone 1 of 6
