Two weekends ago, we started to suspect that Cocoa might have a Urinary Tract Infection. She kept trying to go to the bathroom, but not much was coming out. Like any girl who's had a UTI before would do, I decided to gave her some cranberry juice. Yes, I poured cranberry juice in her water bowl. But, it didn't seem to help, so we took her into the vet's office on Monday. She definitely had a UTI, but the vet wanted to do an X-ray too.
As you can see from the below x-ray, her bladder was full of bladder stones.
The treatment? Surgery.
So, on Thursday of that week, she underwent surgery to remove all of the bladder stones. They ranged in size from tiny pebbles to marbles to what the vet called a "small clementine." Holy s%!@#.
She was kind enough to save the big ones for us to keep for Cocoa's scrapbook.
Cocoa did great in surgery! She was ready to come home the next day, and she sure was happy to see us.
As soon as she got home, she was back at her regular daytime activity - sleeping on the couch.
They sent some of the stones off to the lab, and once we get the lab report back, we'll know how to manage this in the future. Bladder stones are caused by a chemical imbalance in the bladder, a pH imbalance, which allows crystals to form that eventually turn into larger stones. Once we know the imbalance, we can change her diet to get her system rebalanced, and hopefully avoid (or minimize) this happending in the future.
In other "you won't believe this" news.... check out what they found in our neighborhood this month.... an 8-foot gator.
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