Taking A Urine Sample From A Cat
posted in Cat Stories |Have you ever tried taking a urine sample from a cat? No, I hadn’t either until yesterday.
It all started when I had to take Leonard to the vet, as I’d noticed there was blood in his urine.
After a thorough examination, and the pronouncement that he didn’t have a temperature and his heart and lungs were in good order, but he did have a slightly enlarged kidney, we were looking at the possibility of a bacterial infection in his bladder or crystals in his urinary tract.
An injection of an anti-inflammatory and another of antibiotics, followed up by a course of tablets, should soon deal with an infection, if that is the underlying cause. However diagnosis of crystals requires a urine sample.
I naively thought the vet would take that, but I was wrong.
For £8.64 I was sold a ‘urine sample kit’ which consisted of a little bag of sand, a pipette and a small screw top bottle. This was not just any kind of sand, it was special sand, designed to repel liquids rather than absorb them. Spread in a clean litter tray I would be able to draw a sample of liquid into the pipette once Leonard had ‘performed’. Sounds simple doesn’t it?
We decided the best course of action would be to leave Leonard to recover from his vet trip in peace and quiet, so we went out for the afternoon. He’d last ‘splashed his boots’ at around 9.30am so I was confident by the time we got home the deed would be done and I could get my sample.
Leonard however had other ideas. By 9.30pm there was still no sign of any action, so I decided to be pro-active. I spent the next hour trying various methods to persuade Leonard to use his ‘new’ tray.
That might not sound much of an ordeal, but what I haven’t mentioned is that earlier the vet had pronounced Leonard overweight at 7.9kg, (17lbs in old money) and most of my ‘pro-activity’ involved lifting him back into the litter tray each time he got out.
The more I tried the more he resisted, yet I could tell from his body language he was desperate to ‘go’.
The truth was the sand barely covered the bottom of the tray and was obviously not deep enough to dig in. To get any kind of depth I would have needed 10 bags, not just 1.
As time went on I was getting hot and bothered and Leonard was getting confused by my absurd behavior. He particularly liked the bit when I ‘dug’ in the sand with my finger.
In desperation, and the need for a sit down and a drink, I decided to change tack. I got his old litter tray out and a small bowl.
He immediately started digging and squatted down. I thrust the bowl under his tail, in the general direction of where I thought the action was, and hoped for the best.
To my delight I got a reasonable sample and quickly ‘pipetted’ it into the small bottle. I’m slightly ashamed to say I then double bagged it and put it in the fridge. Well what else was I supposed to do with it at that time of night?
I took the sample to the vet this morning and have since had a phone call to say there were no crystals in it, which is good news.
The vet had stressed the importance of regular fluid intake, for both kidneys and bladder, but Leonard has always been hopeless at drinking. Unless it’s a muddy puddle in the bottom of an old plant pot, he’s not interested.
So, in an attempt to increase his fluid intake I’ve half buried an old dish in the garden near one of his favourite places and filled it with water. To my delight he’s already drinking out of it.
So ends an interesting 24 hours.
Finally, in Leonard’s defence, he’s not overweight, he just has thick fur, big bones and a slow metabolism!!
