Dr. Lera Clone describes treating Max, a 15-year-old dog with multiple bladder stones who became acutely obstructed. She used catheterization and saline flushing to push the blocking stone back into the bladder, shown on X-ray, as a temporary fix while planning next steps.
Questions this video answers
15 years old.
Seven or eight times.
Heron Lakes Animal Hospital.
Placement of a urinary catheter and flushing the urethra with saline to push the stone back into the bladder.
(1) Surgical removal of bladder stones; (2) catheterization with attempt to push the stone back into the bladder (temporary solution).
Chapters
Hey, guys. My name is Dr. Lara here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital, and today I just finished dealing with Max. Max has a history of having bladder stones. And so you can see here on the X rays that he's got some bladder stones right in the center. He's got several little stones in there. And so this is a patient that has not been clinical for bladder stones, meaning he's not straining to urinate. He's not sitting there in a posture, like, struggling to try and get urine out. He's not having accidents in the house. He doesn't have blood in his urine. You wouldn't know anything was wrong if we didn't have these X rays to show that he has bladder stones. So I talked to dad about the possibility of a. He could go ahead and do surgical removal of the bladder stones, and then that way we would be able to be in control of any potential emergencies. Or since he was acting clinically, fine. What he could do and what he elected to do was to go ahead and monitor him. And if he did notice him straining to urinate, he would need to bring him in as soon as possible. Today, about 15 minutes ago, Max's dad called and said, hey, I noticed that Max is trying to pee. He's tried to pee seven or eight times. Nothing's coming out. He's going to his favorite spot to pee, and he can't pee. And so I said, he needs to come in right away because he's probably obstructed. Obstructed means that he has something in the way. And so if you guys look right here, this is a bone in the penis, and right in that center is a bladder stone. And so that bladder stone is getting caught because this, at this particular size, it cannot go any further because it's getting stuck in the bone. And so I told dad he had two options. Option one was he could take him to surgery and have the bladder stones removed. Option two was that we could go ahead, pass a catheter on him, and see if we could get this stone to go back up into his bladder. Now, that is something that would have to be done anyways for surgery, but it could be a temporary solution. What I told dad was, we don't know if that's going to last a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. And so Max is 15 years old. As of right now, Dan has elected to go ahead and pass the catheter on him. If you notice right here, you can actually see the catheter pushing the stone up when we're trying to push these stones back into the bladder. It's really important that you shoot X rays so that you can see where the stone is at. When I went ahead and took the catheter out, it actually pulled the stone out or pulled the stone back to its original location. So what we ended up doing was we ended up putting the catheter in just a little bit. And then what we did was we flushed his urethra with some saline that pushed the stone back up to the bladder. And when you look here now, you no longer see that stone in the urethra. All the stones are right here. And so if we look where the stones were before, we don't see anything there. This is a popular view to go ahead and take a look at the urethra to make sure that we don't see any stones there either. And we don't. So as of right now, you know, that's really the plan of attack with Max. And if you find yourself in a situation like this, this could be a temporary solution just while you try to get things in order. If you guys have any questions about this particular topic, please leave it in the comment section. If you guys found this helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and please share. Have a great day and thanks for watching.
