Buddy, the much loved male Staffie belonging to a lovely couple of die-hard Rockers, presented with a real problem – he couldn’t urinate. He had a large prostate cyst with a communication to the urethra, the tube from the bladder. When he tried to urinate, the urine shunted from his bladder to the cyst, and only a dribble came out. He was also losing a lot of weight and vomiting.
We castrated him at our practice in Burton-Upon-Trent (to help the prostatic tissue regress), biopsied the prostate, and placed a cystopexy tube (a means of emptying his bladder through a tube through the body wall by passing his urethra).
Using a catheter passed up his urethra and using the cystopexy tube, we were able to use xrays to demonstrate the location of the urethral-cyst communication.
Once samples of prostate biopsy, blood test results had come back, and a thorough abdominal scan had been done with our colleague Roger, we were confident that no other issues were apparent other than the urinary one.
The owners proved themselves very competent at managing the cystopexy tube and as soon as the cystopexy tube was in use, Buddy stopped vomiting, started eating well and rapidly gained weight.
A couple of weeks later we reopened the abdominal wound, removed the floor of the prostate, mended the hole in the urethra and packed the whole site with omentum. Omentum is the abdomen’s trouble shooter; it is a large membranous structure and its job is to plug unwanted holes in abdominal structures.
A urethral catheter was left in place for a few days as a stent over which the sutured urethral hole could heal.
About a week later the urethral catheter was removed, and once we are sure he can urinate normally. we’ll remove the cystopexy tube.
2nd June 2017
