**WARNING** There are some surgical photos in this post! Chewy is a 6 year old neutered male rabbit whose owners brought him in because he just wasn’t acting normally. He seemed to be eating less and losing some weight. On exam, the doctor noticed that his bladder seemed to be very painful so she recommended having some x-rays taken. As you can see, something very unusual popped up!
The doctor recommended surgery to try to remove the firm object which appears to be in his bladder.
Chewy is now anesthetized and the technician is administered a local block along the incision site to help minimize discomfort. It's marked in purple so the surgeon knows what area was blocked.
This is Chewy's bladder which is thicker than normal, and definitely contains some kind of hard object.
There's only one way to get this mysterious object out! An incision is made into the bladder, but it's too small to get the object out. The object appears to be "stuck" to the wall of the bladder.
After extending the incision a bit, the object finally comes into view-and it looks just like the object on the radiograph.
After removing the oddly-shaped urolith (bladder stone), the bladder was flushed carefully and sutured after taking samples for testing, and the abdominal wall closed. Chewy went home feeling much better that evening. Here is the urolith all cleaned up. Parts were sent off for testing to see what kind of material it’s composed of. The rest went home with the owner as a souvenir!
