Thank you to everyone, again, for your advice! After thinking about how much pain she must be in and the size of the stones, I ended up calling another vet a couple hours’ drive from here for a second opinion. I explained the situation with the size of the stones and the vet’s recommendations (rx foods for life, dissolve with rx food, etc), and the new place was surprised at that. They thought she should come in for surgery instead, and they echoed my fears that trying to dissolve stones that big could cause a blockage if/when they tried to pass. I preferred the surgery route because it could take two months for them to dissolve, which is two more months of my girl being in pain. No thanks. My other thought was monetary – it would cost around $400 for the rx food for the time it would supposedly take to dissolve the stones, and there wasn’t a guarantee that they still wouldn’t have to do surgery. I’d rather just get it taken care of quickly and pay for the surgery.
In the meantime, at the recommendation of the new vet, we’re adding yogurt to one meal a day and feeding the Hills rx as a topper/supplement to the Orijen kibble for the other two meals a day until the surgery next week. And of course keeping her water topped up as we always do, and letting her out every half hour or so. Apparently they send the stones away to a lab for analysis to determine if she does in fact need to be on a special diet the rest of her life, or if the stones were just caused by an infection.
It was really interesting to hear another vet’s interpretation of the situation, and I felt like they were more open to a discussion about our options. And it was nice to hear that I wasn’t the only surprised by my current vet’s blanket “rest of her life” statements without knowing exactly what we were dealing with.
