This Day Three Years Ago

 So this day three years ago Nix was struggling down the stairs with me because I was fairly unresponsive up on the bed. When we got to the vets they couldn’t get my temperature down so Nix had to drive me to the hospital in Brighton so I could stay overnight. They knew my kidneys weren’t right and my temperature was very high so they tried lots of things which didn’t work. 


After a week at the Brighton hospital Nix had to come and get me and drive me to North Downs Specialist Referrals.  They said I should have to stay in for more tests so Nix booked a room in the local pub. After a couple of days they gave Nix three options. They could fit a stent, they could do a bypass or they could completely remove the kidney. They said my other kidney would only sustain me for six months so that was out. Nix and the surgeon decided on a stent but the surgeon called midway and said that the mass they’d seen was infection and if he cleaned that up everything might work again. It only lasted a day and I was sick again. So I had a second operation to put in the stent. They then couldn’t get the stent in as my ureter was too twisted and that’s when they decided to do the bypass. They discovered at the same time I’d had lots of stones, the worst one was in my ureter and it was shunting up and down.




Nix was allowed to see me the day after the second operation and she was amazed that I walked out to meet her. We sat in the hospital garden for a while. Nix kept crying because of my wound but I was okay, it didn’t hurt. Nix brought me a meerkat which she’d kept under her arm so it smelled of her…I still have it, I’ve never tried to rip it up. After a few more days Nix was allowed to take me home. The vet put me in the back of the car and we set off. There were terrible traffic jams apparently and it was very hot and it took us three hours to get home. Nix couldn’t see me from the driver’s seat so she kept jumping out of the car to check I was okay. I don’t really remember much about that but I remember getting home…I went straight to sleep. 



Nix is going to post a photo of the X-ray of my bypass, it’s called a subcutaneous ureteral bypass. For the first year I had to have three day flushes four times a year. That meant every morning and every evening for three days I had to have my bypass flushed through. They use a big needle that goes into the ‘port’ but I don’t feel anything. I just lie there, it’s quite relaxing really because the vet nurses cuddle and kiss me. I’m eleven now and everyone we meet thinks I’m a puppy šŸ™‚



Comments

  1. JennyJuly 24, 2021 at 3:24 PM

    Fripp, you're a miracle boy...coming through all that! Your mum is a wonder too ☺️

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Everything You Wanted to Know About Fripp

Image
My name is Fripp aka The Fripster, I am a Bearded Collie and I came to live with Nix when I was two years old.  I spent the first two years of my life living in Monaco but my owners couldn’t keep me because they were working long hours. Even though Nix lives in the UK she saw me and wanted me, naturally, and so my breeder brought me to the UK when she was visiting Crufts. Nix says she had no idea what she was letting herself in for and if I hadn’t come all the way from France she’d have sent me straight back the next day. She said I was completely untrained, tried to kill the cat and had separation anxiety so bad I would knock her over rather than let her get to the front door. None of this is true of course.  Nix and I have lived in perfect harmony for the last eight years even though she might say different. I got very sick when I was seven with an autoimmune disease called IMTP but I recovered from that even though I was bald for a while. Then a year later I ended up in hos...
Read more

Too Much Noisy Rain

Image
 Last night it started to rain, a lot, and as you know I do not like it when it rains, it scares me. I don’t mind it when I’m out on my walk as you can see from my photos but I don’t like it when I’m inside. I just couldn’t help myself, I had to get off the bed and start digging. Nix was very understanding for once but she does try to get me back on the bed. In the end I gave up and got on the bed and was just drifting off when there was this really loud scary noise. Nix said it sounded like a very loud demented dalek whatever that is...it was very scary and made me and Nix really jump. Turned out to be something to do with her phone and the battery going...is it too much to ask that she keep a check on these things, nearly gave me a heart attack.  It hasn’t stopped raining all day so there are only photos of me wet. I didn’t stay wet for long, I blotted myself off on the sofa first and then Nix’s bed. She thought there were towels on it but I’d dug them all up. The best news ...
Read more

Apparently I’m Always in the Way

Image
So Nix doesn’t understand why I am always behind her, she said it’s starting to annoy her apart from being very dangerous. She says if she falls over me and breaks her hip who’s going to look after me. Have you seen her hips, it’d take a sledgehammer to break one of those. Anyway she keeps saying there’s only one way out of the bungalow so I don’t need to follow her around everywhere. That’s not strictly true because there are doors at the back and a door at the side. She could escape without me through any of those...I must be vigilant at all times. So now she has settled down to finish getting my blog into print and it really is painful to watch. She says it takes twelve taps on the iPad to add one photograph on one day of the blog. She also says if there are thirty days in the month that will take her 360 taps. She’s got six months left to do... I shouldn’t hold your breath for this blog if I was you.  There will of course be a quicker way to do it which she will discover next y...
Read more