By the time Dobby arrived at Ryan Hospital’s Emergency Room (ER), he was in a bad way. The two-year-old Welsh Corgi had been vomiting off and on for a few days and was straining to urinate. “He also wasn’t eating,” says owner Zhi Peng Yang, who lives in Philadelphia and rushed Dobby to Penn Vet.
“When he got here, Dobby was in circulatory shock, and, given his symptoms, I was immediately concerned about a uroabdomen, which is a dangerous situation of urine leaking in the abdomen,” says Natalie Kovak, a resident in the ER and the attending physician that Friday afternoon. “I scanned his abdomen with our ultrasound and did see fluid.”
X-rays also revealed a large stone in the dog’s urethra. It was causing the life-threatening obstruction keeping him from urinating. Kovak placed a drain in Dobby’s abdomen to remove the urine. She also inserted a urethral catheter to help pass the stone and placed him on intravenous fluids, pain medications, and antibiotics.
“He was very unstable,” she remembers. “I actually thought he wasn’t going to make it for a while, even with all our overnight interventions in the ER.”
Read more at Penn Vet Extra.
