Animal Health 10/22/20 - Kidney Enzymes

After doing some blood work it was discovered that the Missy's levels were elevated causing her a lot of discomfort.

If your pet is experiencing similar symptoms, schedule your appointment today!

Dr. karen emerson: good morning sunrisers.

I'm dr. karen emerson and today i have with me, my technician skyler, and this beautiful little terrier mix is missy.

Missy is actually three years old.

And about a month ago she presented to us very, very sick after hours.

She actually came in very lethargic, not eating.

We did some blood work and we found that missy's kidney enzymes were elevated and when kidney enzymes are elevated that can cause you to get really nauseous, not want to eat.

But we had to get down to the bottom of it.

What was causing these kidney enzymes to be elevated?

So we actually did an x- ray and we found a bladder stone.

Now these are stones that can form in dogs bladders, and they can actually grow big enough to take up the entire space of the bladder, causing your baby unable to really urinate normally, or they're urinating constantly.

Dr. karen emerson: and it can cause infection that causes the kidney enzymes to go up.

And her kidney enzymes were quite high.

I think they were almost in the 70's and normal's 20 or less.

So this was definitely an emergency.

So we went ahead and we did surgery and we actually removed the stone out of her bladder.

And i cannot wait to show you the picture of how large these stones can get.

And what is so weird is how the dogs will kind of hide their illnesses up until the point where you see that.

I mean, when you see this stone, you're going to be like, how would she not show clinical signs earlier on?

But animals are like that.

They deal with things so much different than humans do.

If we had a stone like that in our bladder, we would be in severe pain, of course we could vocalize and tell.

Dr. karen emerson: so what her mommy did notice is that she did start drinking more water, and she was urinating a little bit more often than normal, but didn't really see the bad results until she stopped eating and then got really lethargic.

So like i said, we did surgery.

She did very well during surgery.

We actually sent the stone off to find out what kind of stone it was.

She actually is now on a special diet to try to prevent her from having any other stones forming.

And she also had to have antibiotics for quite some time to stop the infection.

Dr. karen emerson: it is so important at least every six months to a year, especially if you have a dog showing these signs, to go ahead, get them in here, let us do the ultrasound, let us do the urinalysis so we can find these things earlier, before they start showing clinical signs.

So if you have a dog drinking more water, urinating more often, maybe having accidents inside, that's probably not behavioral.

It's probably some infectious process going on.

Call us, make that appointment.

I promise your pets will thank you.

And i hope you have a great day.

Announcer: wcbi animal health with dr. emerson was brought to you by emerson animal hospital in west point.

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