Our sweet baby (7 yrs old) bun, Eva, has been struggling with sludge in her bladder for about 6 months now. It started when we found her having accidents when she never had a problem getting to her litter box. Then she became completely untrained in a matter of days. She is never lethargic, always down for a few laps around our apartment and loves head pats. We were also concerned because her urine would randomly have a grainy brown hue to it.
We took her to the vet and in her initial vet visit he said that she had very high levels of crystals in her urine. His suggestion was to encourage more water drinking habits, replace the brita filtered water we were giving her with distilled water filtered through reverse osmosis, and cut out any high calcium food in her diet. We used to feed her Timothy hay and cilantro, parsley and romaine daily, but more recently we found out that parsley can be a culprit in these types of issues so we replaced it with dill. We also wash her greens in distilled water. We fed her pellets but were pretty good at keeping it in a healthy range daily. At the time she had some bacteria in her urinalysis so we went through a round of antibiotics and all the bacteria cleared up.
We thought we saw a light at the end of the tunnel after our second visit. Where our vet said that her bacteria was gone and her crystals had reduced a fair amount. Though still out of the healthy range it had come down considerably.
Then she began to sit in her urine which is when the poopy butt started. For a while her butt was always agitated some hair falling out and redness where her skin was showing. This was very scary. We found a good waterless shampoo (such a weird name for clearly liquid product) that is scentless and organic and regularly gently clean her and dry her off with a blow dryer on low. After a while her scalding went away but the still has patches of missing fur on her butt. Especially above her tail. And if we don’t wash her for a a few weeks her poopy butt will come back. Additionally we have large disposable pee pads in her enclosure which we change 2x a day to give her as dry of an area as we can. Luckily she was peeing a lot and continues to be a voracious urinator to this day (which I’ve heard is good to dissolve more sludge.) We have had some stints where her pee is clear for weeks and some where the brown comes back a lot.
Every time we go to the vet (4x) and get a urinalysis done they say her calcium is over what the machine can read. We don’t know what else we can do. We want her to not be in pain. She used to be such a lovely free roaming bun but now we have to keep her in an enclosure both to monitor her urine and to prevent hours of cleanup daily. Also we spend at least an hour every day playing, running around with her and trying to make sure she is getting enough exercise, but this is of course not ideal for her happiness or freedom.
Our vet has really has given us no more guidance than to continue trying to get her to drink and exercise more. He offered to squeeze her bladder, and show me how to as well, to try to forcibly get the sludge out. But today he informed us that she may never be able to fully overcome this problem. I know that that is a possibility but I just want to throw it out there in case others have had this issue too and had any success with fixing it. We will take care of her no matter what but we know she would be so much happier without this issue.
Also sorry for the long post just wanted to get her full medical history out there. Thank you in advance for any advice!
by yung-nutz