Bladder Stone In Dog?

It’s amazing how dogs and cats shared some similarities with us human. Apart from the daily do’s like eating, drinking and sleeping, they also have some similar diseases, or disease conditions, so to speak. Recently, we had a dog with bladder stone. The owner was quite surprised to know that dogs can have bladder stones. In the mind of the public, you’ll never thought of this to be happened in a dog. Well, yes, it happened. Like they say, SHIT happens.

We had quite a number of urolithiasis (bladder stone) cases in a year. Most dogs were from the pedigree breed. Breed predisposed you might asks? Well, we’re not sure but one thing for sure is that, food does have a role in urolithiasis.

O.K. back to this case. The dog’s name was Lily. It’s a 2 year old female Shih Tzu, weighing around 5.4kg. Lily’s owner noticed blood stain in her urine. She was also getting a bit irritated each time she wanted to release the urine due to pain. Her urination was also becoming more frequent than usual. Sometimes owner may ask a funny question regarding bladder stone. The million dollar question is : “Can my dog gets bladder stone from ingesting stones?”. Well, I leave that to you guys.

Anyway, upon physical examination, Lily was fine, except for the blood in the urine. Sometimes, if the bladder stone was big enough, we could actually palpate the stone if the bladder was not filled with urine. But, in Lily’s case, she was quite fat and palpation of the stone was not possible.

Later, x-ray was done and surely enough, a stone was visible in the x-ray film. I’m sorry I couldn’t post the x-ray here at the moment as I did not take a photo on the x-ray.

So, Lily’s owner had decided to have her operated to remove the bladder stone.

Figure 1 : Lily’s half fulled bladder with 2 stay sutures in placed.

Figure 2 : The bladder stone being removed from Lily’s bladder.

Figure 3 : The urolith, which was removed from Lily’s bladder, was later identified as struvite ( a type of urinary stone in dogs and cats ).

There, you have it. The story of Lily the Shih Tzu. Although the stone has been removed, there’s always a chance of recurrence if the owner do not take care of Lily’s diet and lifestyle.