The
saga of Janie's struvite crystals continues. Yesterday she finished her special diet of Hills Prescription s/d for 2 months, followed by c/d for 2 weeks. We dropped off a sample of urine at the vet to see if the crystals finally dissolved, and today the results told us that they have not.
I spoke to a tech and not the vet so I didn't get to ask a lot of questions or get too much detail, but basically they want to put her back on the s/d, and also supplement that with a "gel" to further help dissolve the crystals. It feels like we've been dealing with this frustrating problem for such a long time now, and we just want to get to the bottom of it already! I feel so bad for the girl, although thank goodness she has lots of energy, isn't in pain and she's eating and drinking normally.
The tech also mentioned that after she's better, they will want to keep her on the c/d indefinitely...which is a problem all its own. Jon and I have done a good amount of research and we've concluded that Hill's food is full of crappy ingredients (corn, fillers), and lacking a few important ones (protein content, etc). We were only willing to feed it to Janie in the short term to get rid of the crystals, but in our opinion it doesn't make for a good long term diet. Not to mention that it's costing small fortune. I am a little nervous though, going against the recommendation of our vet.
We hope that as long as we pick a good wet food and POUR water down her throat, she might be okay. So our plan is to feed her canned wet food...Evo, Merrick, maybe Wellness? As well as a small amount of dry food, possibly from those same brands. We'll stay away from the Innova, even thought its a high quality food, its too high in protein for her. On the ever helpful Dogster nutrition forums, I've read some glowing reviews about
Berry Balance, a powder supplement that's supposed to help tremendously with dogs that are prone to struvite crystals. Anyone out there have experience with this stuff?
Update 7/5: Turns out, the person I spoke to on the phone who gave me the results accidentally read me the results from a previous urinalysis, and her most recent one actually came back negative -- no crystals. Yay! Apparently though, we have nothing to be that excited about bc crystals can be present or not from sample to sample...so because struvite crystals have a high rate of recurrence, we still have her on Hills c/d (struvite preventative) and will undergo 2 more urinalysis until we can say with confidence that this problem is behind us. Problem is, she is still doing a little leaking. So after the 2 urinalysis if she's STILL leaking, then he will look into hormone therapy, as it may be an estrogen deficiency. Did that make sense? Sigh. Monica, I think we may finally get a second opinion. Now I feel like, why the hell are we STILL on this prescription? Even though the recurrence thing makes sense, I feel like they are dragging out the time that she "needs" to be eating that stuff. Like it didn't even matter what the results are, because we're still doing the same thing we were doing when she had crystals. Boo.
