Pet of the month for July 2020 goes to this deserving family- the Manson’s! Within a month period this poor family had not 1 but 2 emergency surgeries performed by Dr Raj on their lovely little girls Millie & Marley.
Millie is their 7yr old Maltese x Shih Tzu who visited us after they had to take her to WAVES emergency as they noticed she was struggling to pass urine and had started vomiting. To determine what was causing her to struggle with passing urine they took a quick x-ray of her abdomen. This x-ray showed them that Millie had lots of bladder stones formed in her bladder (there are multiple factors involved in the formation of bladder stones in dogs). She was kept on fluids & pain relief overnight with them & then came to us in the morning to visit Dr Raj. Dr Raj then performed a Cystostomy (bladder surgery) which involved opening up her abdomen and then making an incision on her bladder so that he could get in & scoop them all out. Everything went very well for Millie under her anaesthetic & she recovered at home perfectly.
Then approximately a month later their other Maltese x called Marley who was about 7 months at the time came to see Dr Joe as she was feeling very lethargic and hadn’t been eating well. On exam you could see she was not behaving like the happy healthy puppy she usually is. Dr Joe did a full exam and when he took her temperature it was much higher than it should have been. She was admitted into hospital for IV fluids, antibiotics & a full blood work up. Everything on the bloods came back as normal so the next step was to have an ultrasound performed. The results were not what we were expecting at all! Poor Marley had an infection occurring in her uterus (AKA: Pyometra). Pyometra is a secondary infection that occurs as a result of hormonal changes in the female's reproductive tract, usually they get this when they are older and have had a couple years’ worth of going on heat. This is the first we have ever seen in a dog where they have gotten the infection after just one heat! Dr Raj took her into surgery that day for an emergency hysterectomy. Her surgery went very well & after a couple days recovering at home she was back to her normal self.
We would like to thank her family for being such amazing fur baby parents during this very stressful couple of months!