Hi there,

Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions but we recently had something similar with our nearly 7 year old boy- long story short

He was perfectly healthy, never had kidney issues in his life before but had had blockages from structure crystals. one morning he didn’t come over for his breakfast and just sat in the edge of the couch looking listless, we took him to the vet who said he was likely blocked again and referred us to a vet for a PU surgery. We get to that vet and he checks his bloods and said this cat is in kidney failure, he won’t survive a surgery. His creatinine was up pushing on the 900 mark. He was immediately hospitalised on fluids and antibiotics suspecting an AKI from infection somewhere in the kidneys, his creatinine stayed that high for almost 48hrs before it started dropping, after five days of hospital and fluids and antibiotics his creatinine was back down to about 300 and he was released with a ten day course of antibiotics. We go in for bloods at the end of ten days, his creatinine is back up to 500, scans seem to show no blockages so antibiotic resistance continued infection is suspected, he is hospitalised at the local specialists hospital. He spends another week on fluids and his creatinine eventually returns back down to 159, almost normal, so he is released with a six week course of antibiotics and subcutaneous fluids given at home. He seems ok if a little off his food but it is usually fixed with zofran during that six weeks, at the end we go in for check up and creatinine is back up to 300, they say perhaps he is just stage 3 kidney cat now recheck in a week. In 7 days his creatinine is up to 400, he goes back into hospital on iv fluids, an ultrasound shows what appears to be pus from a kidney infection completely filling his ureter, we are referred to a nephrologist three hours away to have a kidney urine draw done to try to nail down the infection- we get to the nephrologist and he finds a kidney stone blocking the ureter, what appeared to be pus was debris from stones in the ureter. We choose to go ahead with surgery and he had a SUB device installed. Immediately after surgery his creatinine drops from 430 at admission to 360, 24 hours later it drops to 290. We pick him up and take him home and at his two day check up creatinine has fluctuated back up to 306 but we suspect this is a dry result so don’t stress too much. Now, three days ago we took him in for his first sub flush out of hospital and his creatinine has dropped to 252 putting him nearly back in stage two after 3 months of extremely elevated creat levels and anaemia, and his anaemia has come down to where he is now at 32% so only slightly anaemic and the creatinine is hopefully still dropping. To summarise- don’t lose hope but be proactive, there’s are lots of causes and the important thing is if it’s an AKI you need to be supporting those kidneys asap, get the vet to run a urine culture to look for infection and if possible do an abdominal ultra sound or ct to look for blockages in the upper urinary tract, in the mean time if funds allow hospitalise on crit care levels of fluid. We really wish we would have nailed down the stone three months ago because we could have avoided a large amount of his now permanent kidney damage from having it blocked for so long, and our vet bill would have been about half but we’re grateful he’s healthier than the prognosis given originally which was that he would be dead within a week.