Another day, another crisis?

Since my last posting was the first on this blog, I wanted to establish what I'm doing here before getting into what's currently going on with Tony, but something happened yesterday that I need to discuss.

Although, as I said, his health hasn't been too bad overall, 2 weeks ago Tony came down with a massive bladder infection, his first since he was diagnosed. It was pretty horrifying-- we discovered he had a problem when a little pool of bloody liquid appeared on the kitchen floor. I called the vet (it was 8PM!), and by some miracle she was there. She told me to take him to the animal emergency room right away, which I did. We weren't sure whether the liquid was urine or a very thin vomit, but within 2 minutes of arriving at the hospital, it became obvious that it was urine: Tony, who never has accidents, was straining to urinate on the waiting room floor, and he did this 5 times during the hour and a half we were there. Poor little guy! He was mortified, refusing to make eye contact and keeping his head down, but he wasn't whimpering or giving any indication that he was in pain. Can I emphasize this enough? Many dogs are stoic when it comes to pain (according to a vet I know, it's a survival trait), and the first indication that a dog has a serious problem is often something like Tony's bloody urine. It sure would help if I were psychic-- that's the only way I could have known that the infection was there.

At any rate, yesterday we went to his regular vet for a followup visit. Tony had responded well to the antibiotics, and we weren't anticipating any problems. The vet did an ultrasound as part of the urine collection process, so that they could do a culture and make sure that the infection was gone, and she practically ran into the examining room where I was waiting. The ultrasound showed that there was a stone in his bladder. They took an x-ray then, which revealed that not only was there a good-sized stone in his bladder, there were 5 or 6 smaller stones in his urethra (when I saw the x-ray, the first thought I had was that it looked like a string of beads). The poor guy had probably been having problems from this for a while, but he's so tough, I didn't have a clue. Incidentally, the vet seems to share my feeling that we should have had some psychic awareness of this, because she kept apologizing as if she should have known, even though she couldn't have.

So, in a couple of hours Tony and I will be at the vet's, where he will be having surgery to remove all of the stones. I'll let you know how it goes.