21/08/2025
🐾 Betsy's story 🐾
*Warning - gruesome picture at the end!*
Betsy came to us having spent the day not feeling well, not eating and being sick. She was clingy and cuddly with her mum, more so than usual, and not her usual bouncy self.
She had a check over in consult and her temperature was 39.7 and she was really painful in her abdomen. Vet, Sinéad, could feel something abnormal on the right hand side of her abdomen.
She was admitted to the hospital where she had blood tests and was started on fluids and painkillers. The blood tests showed a really bad infection but this didn't explain the lump we could feel so we did some more imaging. The x-rays and ultrasound showed showed a mineralised opacity (a stone made of a particular type of crystals) in her bladder, but also that her right kidney was much larger than it should have been and the lumen (that would usually collect and discrete urine) was much more distended than it should be.
The combination of both imaging modalities revealed that Betsy also had a small stone lodged in her ureter, blocking her right kidney. This, in combination with the infection in her blood stream, was making her critically unwell and she was rapidly deteriorating. The team got straight to work, taking her into surgery that evening after stabilising fluids, and removed the offending kidney.
As she was so poorly before her major surgery, we stayed with her overnight to make sure she pulled through. She stayed the following day on fluids, pain relief and lots of TLC, and went home that night to a steak dinner! She returned the next morning for more fluids to make sure we could flush through any remaining small stones (called uroliths) to reduce the risk of the other kidney becoming blocked, and then went home to plenty of love and fuss over the weekend. She's now back to her usual tricks, bum shaking with happiness and terrorising the cats!
Betsy will have to stay on a special diet for the rest of her life to change the acidity of her urine and decrease the risk of a future build up of stones, but this time she's had a lucky escape! And just like humans, as long as we take good care of the remaining kidney, she should be able to function just fine with only one!
Well done Betsy and family 🥰
