We are going through a pretty difficult time here, first losing Aislyn and
now Bandit is having serious problems after his surgery.  I'll make this
as brief as possible:
 
Bandit is our 8 year old neutered male, who had insulinoma surgery three
years ago.  We've managed him medically for the last couple years fairly
successfully, however in recent months his quality of life has been
declining.  He had maxed out on his doses of pred and diazoxide, so we
decided to try surgery again.  An exploratory was done on 10/30/00, at
which time a very large mass was found and removed.  My vet, Dr. Wellborn
described it as the size of a golf ball.  The path report showed that the
entire mass was adrenal tumor, benign with precancerous indications.  His
recovery has been slow, but he took a significant turn for the worse on
Sunday when he appeared to have increasing difficulty urinating.  I took
him in on Monday and his bladder was absolutely huge as the urinary tract
had become blocked.  I saw the xray and it appeared to fill his whole
abdominal cavity -- it was even displacing his spleen, creating a lump on
his side.  His bladder was flushed and he is on antibiotics for a severe
UTI.  Unfortunatey his kidney function is seriously impaired.  His BUN on
Monday was 231 and creatinine was 9.  He has been on IV and antibiotics
since then and his bladder is being manually expressed.  The bloodwork
yesterday showed the creatinine had dropped some, to 6 point something.
His BUN was still over 140, which is as high as the clinic's scale goes
(the initial bloodwork had been sent out to a lab).  Bandit is spending
his days at our regular clinic and nights at the emergency clinic to be
monitored and cared for around the clock.  We do see him, as we transport
him and bring him by home to give him his regular meds and to syringe feed
him (they do feed him at the clinics as well every 4 hours).
 
Can you think of anything else we can be doing to help him through this?
And do you have any idea of whether we should reasonably expect him to
come through this and how long it could take to see improvement?  I have
no intention at all of giving up on him as long as there is a possiblity
of improvement, but at the same time he appears pretty miserable and I
don't want him to suffer unnecessarily.
 
I'm sorry this ended up being so long; I didn't want to leave out anything
that might have been important.  Any suggestions or thoughts you may have
would be most appreciated.
 
Many thanks, Lucie
[Posted in FML issue 3231]